Insects, Butterflies & Dragonflies

I have a lot more questions than answers about these creatures, but know from my personal experiences with Ranger that they are somehow connected with life on the other side. About a week before Ranger crossed over on September 2, 2020, a beautiful large butterfly with wings of the most lush blue color kept alighting over and over in front of myself and Ranger in our campground yard. Ranger was lying across my lap, I was enjoying his company and stroking him in the warm August sunlight. When the blue butterfly first appeared I was delighted by its beauty but sure that it would soon flitter away, as butterflies do. But this one would land in front of us, fly up and then land again right in front of us, over and over. Its behavior caught my eye, as it seemed to be trying to get my attention by landing in front of me repetitively - it was if it had something to say. The butterfly kept up her dance for about 20 minutes before she finally flew off. I had never seen a blue butterfly at the camp, and I never again would after that day.

Long before the beautiful blue butterfly, I had started to really take notice of insect activity on and around Ranger during his health crisis. The first thing I noticed were these Daddy Long Leg spiders with very long legs and super big bellies that would appear on his head, on his body and butt - both inside and outside the house, and even in the truck. A Daddy Long Legs is not an unusual sight at all, and there were occasionally one of them in the downstairs bathtub. But the ones I had seen before always had normal size bellies, and the ones that started appearing on Ranger had bellies of a proportion I had never witnessed before. They appeared on him so frequently that my mind flagged something as unusual about this activity, but I really didn't know what to think about it beyond it being odd. And then I noticed other unusual insect appearances - once when we were lying on the porch, I saw a large black scarab crawl up him and head to his belly area. In the years I'd been up in Malta, I had never seen a black scarab anywhere, and certainly this one, crawling on Ranger really got my attention. At the end of June there was a proliferation of stinkbugs. Stinkbugs are not unusual in and of themselves - but I started to notice that there were always stinkbugs near Ranger on the porch, and then I saw 3 stinkbugs inside the home - and they did not leave for weeks. When we moved to the campsite in NJ in July, somehow these stinkbugs would be on our motorcycles, and then there were a few inside the RV as well. It seemed everywhere I looked, that a stinkbug was tracking Ranger and I...As I said, stinkbugs are nothing really to bat an eye at, but the way these bugs were always around us and in the weirdest places - I thought to myself again, 'this is not normal insect behavior'. I really don't have much to say about all these insect appearances except that there seemed to be some kind of connection between Ranger and these creatures.

It wasn't until Ranger crossed over to the spirit world, that the explosion of insect communication really started. A few weeks after his crossing I had my first visitation by a very large green dragonfly. I was sitting on the steps of of our RV, and the green dragonfly flew from nowhere directly at me - and then it continued to do this, fly away a short distance then fly right back at me. I had the distinct sense it was communicating with me. It wasn't flying around me, it was flying at me.

A short time later, a few days on, as I was walking around the lake at our campground, overcome with such deep pain, I sat down by the water's edge. Perched on a rock at the lake's edge was an orange dragonfly. As I'm looking at the dragonfly, he flies towards me and lands on my knee. I was kind of shocked, I had never had a dragonfly land on me before. He sat on my knee for a while, and then decided to fly to my hand and sit on my hand. I truly thought that maybe this would keep up for a few minutes at most and then my orange dragonfly friend would fly away or back to his rock to perch on. There were no other dragonflies visible on the lake that day, it was just this beautiful orange creature. The dragonfly continued to sit on my knee or hand for the next 40 minutes! Pretty much all of which I have on video. At times he would fly off a very short distance and then return promptly to my hand. Now during this 40 minutes I experienced some very curious sensations with my friend, he would often turn his body so that his multi-eyed oculi were facing directly towards me, as if he was studying me. For the whole time I felt a sense of such tender love flowing from his microscopic legs, through and up my arms and flooding my whole body. At the end of our time together he flew away, just gone. I know after looking into it that there are dragonflies who are perchers, they protect their dragonfly clan and also heat up their bodies by perching. Perching on a rock is one thing, but I would say it is definitely abnormal insect behavior for a dragonfly to do a marathon perch on a human being for three quarters of an hour!

I traveled back upstate to Malta a short time later. It was such a hard trip, I had decided to return Ranger's barely used new bottles of anti-convulsants to the clinic so that another pet owner who may not have been tight on cash could benefit them. I'm not sure how I actually made it to the clinic, I just had so many tears flooding my face. The tears were still flowing after I left the clinic and made the rest of the short drive to the home in Malta. As I pull into my driveway, a large Monarch butterfly appears right in front of my truck window, stayed there for a few moments, and then did a reverse dive straight up into the blue sky. It didn't fly away, it literally dove right upwards into the sky and out of sight. I felt in that moment a deep sense of connection and soothing - I felt that butterfly came just for me.

I'm not sure if it was this trip to Malta or the one after - but I decided to take the canoe to Moreau Lake to honor Ranger. Ranger loved to go out on the canoe on the lakes up in the Adirondack Region, and Moreau Lake was really one of our favorites. We had also been out on this lake with my boyfriend, the 3 of us in the canoe, fishing and eating lunch. There really is not greater joy than those times we all shared together, out on the lakes in the canoe. The lake was so beautiful on this September afternoon with leaves just beginning to catch fire and it felt so peaceful at the start of my row. But I was the only one out on that lake the whole afternoon, and the peaceful feeling started to morph into a deep melancholy, loneliness and grief. I was out here alone, without my best friend. His life jacket was tied around one of the canoe beams, but he was not physically in the canoe with me. I started to cry hard in the middle of the lake. In a little while, I noticed this black dot in the sky on the other side of the lake. I saw the black dot moving towards me in a straight line...surely this was not another butterfly? It was a butterfly, moving straight towards me, unwavering, not dallying with anything on that lake but instead making a direct trajectory to me. I'm not sure how long it took that butterfly to reach me, a minute or two?, but it did and once it came close to my heart area, it flew straight up over my head and out of sight. In the 3 hours I was on the lake that afternoon I had not seen one single other butterfly, except for this one who pursued me with purpose from the edge of the lake.

After these experiences, it seemed that the unusual insect activity faded away. But not entirely. A few months later in November when we moved to our new campground, we were befriended by our neighbor's dog, an Australian Collie. Cuda would bring so much joy to us as he would greet us in the morning in our yard, and give us so much love when he would see us. One day he came over to my boyfriend and I and promptly laid down across my boyfriend's foot. This was a behavior Ranger would do all the time, lay across his foot. My boyfriend noticed it right away and looked at me - and in the next instant we saw a big Daddy Long Legs with a big belly walking around the perimeter of Cuda. We both looked at each other, we didn't have to say a word. We've now been at this other campground for 4 months and this is the only Daddy Long Legs we've seen here...

What really amazes me is that after experiencing some of the butterfly and dragonfly visitations, I learned through reading books on afterlife experiences after Ranger crossed over, that actually many people have had these experiences with butterflies and dragonflies - those experiences that I would coin 'abnormal insect behavior'. It just amazed me that in book after book I read, that I saw that my experiences with the green and orange dragonfly were experiences that other people had with these creatures when their loved ones crossed over. I even listened to a neurosurgeon who had a near death experience, and rode to the world of spirit on the back of a large blue butterfly...

Reading these accounts left me with more questions than answers. What are these creatures doing? Do they travel between the worlds? Do our loved ones in spirit have the ability to manipulate their behavior to show us that they are communicating with us and loving us from that other world? Why do so many people have experiences with butterflies and dragonflies? I can't seem to find answers to these questions, the best I can come up with after some meditation and time is that perhaps these creatures live in both worlds - and are messengers that can truly communicate and live between both the physical & spirit worlds.

Note: February 5, 2021. I had just had a powerful and intense communication period with Ranger the day before after moving a couple of years worth of photos of his from 2011-2014 into a folder with his name. Later that evening, my partner came back from standing outside our RV in the snow and said he had just smelled Ranger's poop. Neither of us have had the poop smell visitation since September (see my post on Smelling Poop). This morning after my meditation I asked Ranger if he could please send a campground dog to me. On our walk, our neighbor's dog, Buddy ran over to my partner and I and showered us in a lot of love. The campground, filled with snow from the Nor'easter was peaceful but empty, devoid of any human or animal form - except for Buddy. When I came back into the RV to take a shower, I opened up the shower door and a stinkbug dropped right from the ceiling to the shower floor in front of me. It's the dead of Winter here in the North East, the last stinkbug I saw was from 5 months ago. Here was this lone stinkbug, living in our RV with us unbeknownst to us, and it decides to make its presence known this morning by dropping dramatically from the shower ceiling in front of me...abnormal insect behavior.