I have a fetish for dragonflies. I mean, they make love in the air - what's not cool about that? Well, kinda - they perform all sorts of acrobatics to copulate, but let's not get away from the romance of it - I choose to think about how sex and flying is a really cool concept. I also think they are fun to draw or create likenesses of, because they have really simple geometric shapes. They are reminiscent of what we love about nature, too - being of the air, they have an ethereal quality, and they remind us of summer days, lakes and sunshine.

Did you know that:

• There's more species in the dragonfly family than the mammal family

• Their wings beat at up to 35 times a second

• They can fly forward or backward at 18mph

• Their field of vision is pretty close to 360°

• The largest species has been known to fly across the Atlantic!

As I was drawing this paste-up on my bus a few years ago, I was meditating on natural landscapes and the ones that I was emotionally invested in. One was Australia and the coast I was brought up on, and one was England and, in particular, Somerset and the area around Glastonbury Tor.

The rain has since washed this away as I failed to put anything on to protect it, but I still enjoyed thinking about dragonflies and the natural world as I sketched out the geometrics of the dragonfly's design.

With this mosaic, however, my contemplation was quite different.

First of all I was thinking about the importance of using materials I had to hand rather than buying new things. I've been really conscious of the circular economy of late in preference to recycling. Re-using and re-purposing are much better solutions than throwing things in recycling bins. Hence, this digging up of old plates rather than buying colour selected tiles. I love the mis-matched plates I buy from charity shops, and part of me was a bit sorry to smash these babies up to make the wings. The body was easier - we'd had a broken marble breadboard around for ages and I was happy to finally take a hammer to it!

I feel less comfortable about the use of concrete, as it has it's own toll on the environment, but I assuaged my worryings with the fact we were creating something beautiful and hopefully permanent on the landscape. This was the part I stood back from - Jamie's a far better layer of concrete than me!

Just as I had sketched out the dragonfly on the bus, I was enjoying the 'drift' that comes when you're immersed in something. It's a different quality of thought from composing an email, writing a Steempost, or any of the other consuming activities that fill our days. Creativity in that way allows us to daydream. Hirst is talking about poetry in this quote, but it's the same quality, whatever it is we create:

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

My drift took me to a contemplation of how we try to capture the ethereal and beautiful in the most mundane of things - concrete and plates, ink and paint, functional words. It's how we arrange them that creates beauty, but still, we can never truly and utterly capture the essence of something extraordinary. If the dragonfly were to disappear, were any interpretations of it's form going to be a solace for us?

After the Dragonflies
AS Merwin
Dragonflies were as common as sunlight
hovering in their own days
backward forward and sideways
as though they were memory
now there are grown-ups hurrying
who never saw one
and do not know what they
are not seeing
the veins in a dragonfly’s wings
were made of light
the veins in the leaves knew them
and the flowing rivers
the dragonflies came out of the color of water
knowing their own way
when we appeared in their eyes
we were strangers
they took their light with them when they went
there will be no one to remember us

There is such poignancy here as he writes of a future where dragonflies 'were' part of the light, the rivers, the leaves, the water, but are no more in Merwin's imagination - taking their 'light with them when they went'.

It's a reminder not to take things for granted. Dragonflies have been around for 325 million years and are now threatened by pollution, pesticides and habitat loss. In the UK, 3 of the 42 species of British dragonflies have gone extinct since the 1960's. In Australia too, our unique dragonflies are under threat, although they fair a lot better than other wetland creatures according to this research . However, it's still a reminder that climate change action is as important as ever.

I certainly don't want this mosaic to be the only reminder of 'dragonflies, as common as sunlight'!

All that aside, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and it did fill that paver-less spot in the middle of my garden path. What do you think? In this photo, the concrete is yet to dry, and I'm going to grout a little around it as there's some raised bits that could fairly slice open my feet (and I'm a barefoot garden girl) - but I'll share that another day.

I'm also totally honoured to be a passenger on the #ecotrain - check out this hashtag for some pretty amazing posts permaculture to meditation, environmental issues to food forests - I highly recommend checking out this tag as you're guaranteed of sweeeetness!