THE DRAGONFLY DOESN’T FLY BACKWARD TO PROVE IT SURVIVED

Moving Forward With No Regrets

By April Louann Mitchell

A dragonfly can fly backward.

I know.

And that makes this story better, not worse.

Because moving forward has never meant pretending the past does not exist.

Sometimes we go backward because there is something there we still need to understand.

Sometimes we circle.

Sometimes we hover.

Sometimes we return to the same place carrying completely different eyes.

Sometimes we have to look again because we missed something the first time.

But there comes a point when looking backward stops teaching us anything.

There comes a point when we are no longer examining the past.

We are living inside it.

And I don’t want to live there anymore.

The Archive can keep it.

The Archive can hold the memories.

The lessons.

The mistakes.

The beautiful things.

The painful things.

The things I understand now.

The things I may never understand.

That is what an Archive is for.

But I am still alive.

And living things are allowed to move.

I do not have to keep returning to the fire to prove that it burned me.

I do not have to reopen every wound to prove that it hurt.

I do not have to explain every scar so somebody else will agree that it exists.

I do not have to spend my future defending my past.

And I certainly do not have to fly backward to prove I survived.

I survived.

Now the question is:

Where am I going?

THE ARCHIVE KEEPS THE PAST

There are things worth keeping.

I should probably begin there.

I am, after all, building an Archive.

I keep stones.

I keep fossils.

I keep petrified wood.

I keep strange objects that come out of the Earth and make me stop whatever I am doing long enough to ask:

What is this?

I keep photographs.

I keep paintings.

I keep stories.

I keep objects whose original owners and histories may be long gone.

I keep questions that do not yet have answers.

And perhaps because I have spent so much of my life looking backward through objects, memories, landscapes and stories, I have begun to understand something I did not understand before.

Keeping the past and living in the past are not the same thing.

An Archive preserves.

It records.

It remembers.

It examines.

It asks questions.

It protects what deserves remembering.

But an Archive is not supposed to become a prison.

And neither is memory.

WHAT DOES “NO REGRETS” ACTUALLY MEAN?

I have been thinking about regret.

We throw those words around so easily.

No regrets.

We print them on shirts.

We put them on signs.

We use them like declarations of fearlessness.

But I don’t think living without regret means looking backward at every decision we have ever made and announcing that we would happily make every single one again.

That would not be honest.

Of course there are things we would change.

There are words we wish we had never said.

There are words we wish we had said sooner.

There are people we trusted too much.

People we understood too late.

Moments when we stayed when perhaps we should have left.

Moments when we left when perhaps we should have stayed.

Opportunities we missed.

Warnings we ignored.

Boundaries we did not know how to establish.

Years when we were simply trying to survive with whatever information we had at the time.

There are things we would change if somebody handed us a machine capable of returning us to yesterday.

But nobody is handing us that machine.

Yesterday has already happened.

So perhaps living with no regrets means something else.

Perhaps it means:

I will not spend the rest of my life punishing myself for being the person I was before I knew what I know now.

A DRAGONFLY CAN MOVE IN MORE THAN ONE DIRECTION

This is why I love the dragonfly metaphor even more when we tell the truth about it.

Dragonflies are extraordinary flyers.

They can hover.

They can change direction rapidly.

They can move sideways.

They can move backward.

They can accelerate forward.

Their movement is not confined to one simple straight line.

Neither is ours.

Moving forward in life does not mean never looking backward.

Sometimes we need to.

Sometimes we have to return to something because we finally have enough distance to understand it.

Sometimes we revisit a memory and realize we interpreted it incorrectly.

Sometimes we need to apologize.

Sometimes we need to forgive.

Sometimes we need to understand why we made a decision.

Sometimes we need to examine the evidence again.

Sometimes we need to retrieve a piece of ourselves we accidentally left behind.

There is nothing inherently wrong with looking backward.

The question is:

Is there anything left back there I still need to learn?

And if the answer is no, why am I still standing there?

WHAT IS THIS?

There it is again.

The question that seems to follow me everywhere.

What is this?

When I find an object, the question begins research.

When I find a stone, it begins observation.

When I find something buried, it begins excavation.

But perhaps it is also a useful question for our lives.

What is this thing I am carrying?

Is it grief?

Is it guilt?

Is it responsibility?

Is it somebody else’s responsibility that I somehow picked up?

Is it fear?

Is it loyalty?

Is it habit?

Is it love?

Is it anger?

Is it hope?

Is it the memory of something that no longer exists in the form I remember?

Is it something that still needs my attention?

Or is it something I have already examined a thousand times?

We cannot decide what to carry until we are willing to identify what is in our hands.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND REGRET ARE NOT THE SAME THING

Moving forward without regret does not mean refusing accountability.

I believe deeply in accountability.

If I hurt someone, I should be willing to look at that.

If I make a mistake, I should be willing to say:

I made a mistake.

If I contribute to a problem, I should be able to say:

I had a part in this.

Accountability does not diminish us.

It gives us information.

It teaches us where the path went wrong.

It allows us to make a different decision next time.

But accountability and endless self punishment are not the same thing.

At some point, learning has to become movement.

Otherwise the lesson becomes another stone tied around our ankle.

There is a difference between remembering a mistake so we do not repeat it and forcing ourselves to relive it forever.

One is wisdom.

The other can become punishment.

I am interested in wisdom.

THE EARTH DOES NOT PUT EVERYTHING BACK WHERE IT STARTED

I think about landscapes.

Water moves stone.

Wind moves sand.

Rivers change course.

Coastlines retreat.

Trees fall.

Seeds travel.

Fire changes forests.

Pressure transforms minerals.

Earth covers things and eventually uncovers them somewhere inside another generation.

Nature is full of change.

And nature does not seem particularly concerned with returning everything to exactly where it started.

We are.

Human beings love restoration.

We want things back.

The old relationship.

The old house.

The old body.

The old certainty.

The old version of ourselves.

Before.

That word can carry an enormous amount of weight.

Before this happened.

Before I knew.

Before everything changed.

But sometimes there is no return to before.

Sometimes there is only:

What now?

WHAT NOW?

That may be one of the most important questions I have learned to ask.

Not:

How do I undo everything?

Not:

How do I make every person understand?

Not:

How do I guarantee I never hurt again?

Not:

How do I return to exactly who I was?

What now?

What is true now?

What do I know now?

What do I need now?

What deserves my attention now?

What am I building now?

Where do I want my feet pointed now?

That is intention.

Not certainty.

Direction.

I do not need to know exactly where the path ends in order to know which direction I refuse to keep walking.

NO REGRETS DOES NOT MEAN NO GRIEF

You can choose to move forward and still grieve.

You can know a decision is necessary and still wish it had never become necessary.

You can release something and still miss it.

You can love someone and understand that love alone cannot solve everything.

You can remember beautiful moments without pretending the painful ones never happened.

Human beings contain contradictions.

So does nature.

Fire can warm and destroy.

Water can nourish and erode.

Stone can appear permanent and still fracture.

A dragonfly can move forward and backward.

Two things can be true.

Maybe maturity is learning to tolerate that.

Maybe moving forward does not require us to rewrite the past into something simple.

Perhaps we can say:

There was beauty there.

There was pain there.

There were mistakes there.

There was love there.

There were things I did not understand.

There are things I understand now.

And I am still going.

THE BODY KEEPS ITS OWN ARCHIVE

Sometimes we think we have made a decision long before the rest of us catches up.

The mind says:

Move forward.

The body says:

I am tired.

The mind says:

It is over.

The body says:

I am still carrying it.

The mind says:

Tomorrow.

The body says:

Not so fast.

I think we owe ourselves patience in those moments.

Moving forward does not have to mean sprinting.

Sometimes movement is almost invisible.

Eating something.

Sleeping.

Taking a walk.

Making one phone call.

Answering one email.

Sitting outside.

Picking up a paintbrush.

Writing one page.

Taking care of the ordinary machinery of life while something inside us rearranges itself.

There are seasons when progress looks remarkably unimpressive from the outside.

It still counts.

Sometimes survival is not a dramatic comeback.

Sometimes survival is making it through an ordinary Saturday morning and deciding there will be a Sunday.

THE HEARTSTONE WAS FORGOTTEN BEFORE IT BECAME A BEGINNING

This is where my mind inevitably returns to the Heartstone.

Before there was a book, there was an object.

Before there was Ignivar, there was a question.

Before there was a Dragonfly Archive, there was something I had passed by so many times that it had almost disappeared into familiarity.

Then I looked again.

That second look did not change the past.

It changed what happened next.

That distinction feels important.

The Heartstone did not need its history rewritten in order to become meaningful.

It simply needed to be seen.

And from that act of looking came questions.

From questions came imagination.

From imagination came story.

From story came Book One.

And from Book One came an entire world I could not have predicted when I first began.

Sometimes we think moving forward requires some enormous act of reinvention.

Maybe sometimes it begins with one second look.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN WALKING PAST?

That question belongs to all of us.

What possibility have I stopped seeing because I am too busy staring at what went wrong?

What part of myself have I overlooked?

What dream did I put down because survival required something else for a while?

What friendship have I neglected?

What talent have I dismissed?

What place have I never visited?

What story have I not written?

What painting is waiting?

What book is waiting?

What version of my life exists beyond the edge of what I can currently imagine?

We spend so much time worrying about the doors that closed.

Perhaps we occasionally need to turn around.

There may be an entire hallway behind us.

THE PAST HAS ALREADY TAKEN ENOUGH

There are moments when I think this may be the sentence at the center of everything:

The past has already taken enough.

It has taken time.

It has taken tears.

It has taken sleep.

It has taken conversations.

It has taken energy.

It has taken days that could have been spent creating.

It has occupied enough rooms inside the mind.

At some point, we have to decide whether it also gets tomorrow.

That decision does not erase anything.

It does not excuse anything.

It does not magically heal anything.

It simply establishes a boundary between what happened and what happens next.

The Archive can keep the record.

I do not have to become the record.

THE FUTURE NEEDS SOMETHING FROM US TOO

We spend enormous amounts of energy honoring the past.

Anniversaries.

Photographs.

Stories.

Objects.

Memorials.

Archives.

All of that matters.

But the future deserves something from us too.

Attention.

Protection.

Possibility.

A little imagination.

There is a future version of ourselves waiting to inherit whatever we decide to leave behind.

What do we want that person to receive?

Only ashes?

Or perhaps something else?

A finished painting.

A manuscript.

A garden.

A healthier boundary.

A new friendship.

A business that kept growing.

A room full of books.

A morning that feels peaceful.

A life that does not require constant explanation.

Maybe we cannot guarantee any of those things.

But we can begin building toward them.

CREATION IS A FORM OF FORWARD MOTION

I have become convinced of this.

Every time we create something, we make a small wager on the future.

A painter puts color on canvas because there will be another moment when someone sees it.

A writer puts words on a page because there will be a reader.

A gardener plants because there will be another season.

A person builds something because tomorrow exists.

Creation faces forward.

That does not mean artists are never sad.

It does not mean writers are healed.

It does not mean creating erases pain.

Sometimes we create while hurting.

Sometimes the painting and the pain occupy the same room.

Sometimes the story is written in the middle of uncertainty.

Maybe that is exactly why it matters.

Creating something says:

This is not the end of my story.

IGNIVAR WAS NEVER ONLY ABOUT FIRE

Ignivar entered The Dragonfly Journals as a flame born guardian.

Keeper of fire, stone, and story.

But the longer I live with this character, the more I understand guardianship differently.

A guardian does not control everything.

A guardian decides what deserves protecting.

There is a difference.

We cannot control every outcome.

We cannot control every opinion.

We cannot control the past.

We cannot control every person we love.

We cannot control what someone else chooses to carry.

But we can become more deliberate about what receives access to us.

Our time.

Our energy.

Our work.

Our peace.

Our imagination.

Our future.

Not everything deserves equal access.

That is not cruelty.

That is guardianship.

THE ARCHIVE IS NOT A GRAVEYARD

This matters.

The Dragonfly Archive is full of old things.

But it is not about death.

It is about continuation.

An object emerges from the Earth and becomes a question.

A question becomes research.

Research becomes understanding.

Understanding sometimes becomes story.

Story becomes connection.

Connection becomes another question.

Nothing ends where we expect it to.

The Archive keeps moving.

So should we.

WHAT MOVING FORWARD WITH NO REGRETS REALLY MEANS

For me, I think it means this:

I will tell the truth about what happened without allowing it to become the only truth about my life.

I will accept responsibility for what belongs to me.

I will refuse responsibility for what does not.

I will learn.

I will apologize when I owe an apology.

I will change what needs changing.

I will protect what needs protecting.

I will grieve what needs grieving.

I will remember what deserves remembering.

And then I will turn toward what is still possible.

Not because the past did not matter.

Because the future matters too.

BEGIN AGAIN

Those words can sound enormous.

Begin again.

But beginning again does not necessarily mean destroying everything and starting from nothing.

Sometimes beginning again means waking up tomorrow.

Sometimes it means writing the next sentence.

Sometimes it means putting another book on the shelf.

Sometimes it means meeting a reader.

Sometimes it means laughing unexpectedly.

Sometimes it means discovering that you went an entire hour without thinking about the thing that once occupied every minute.

Then perhaps an afternoon.

Then perhaps a day.

Healing does not always announce itself.

Sometimes we notice it only after it has already begun.

IF YOU ARE CARRYING REGRET

Maybe you are reading this with your own history sitting beside you.

Maybe there is something you wish you could change.

Perhaps there is a decision.

A relationship.

A loss.

A mistake.

A season you wish had gone differently.

I cannot tell you what to do with it.

The Archive has never pretended to possess answers it does not have.

But perhaps I can offer a question.

Is there anything left there that you still need to learn?

If there is, look.

Look honestly.

Ask questions.

Take responsibility where it belongs.

Seek help where it is needed.

Make amends where you can.

But if you have already learned the lesson, perhaps it is time to stop retaking the class.

THE DRAGONFLY DOESN’T FLY BACKWARD TO PROVE IT SURVIVED

And neither should we.

Look backward when there is something worth learning.

Circle when you need another view.

Hover when you need time.

Land when you are tired.

Change direction when the path changes.

But do not keep returning to the fire simply because somebody might question whether you were burned.

You know what you lived.

You know what you learned.

You know what remains.

There comes a moment when survival stops being about proving what happened.

It becomes about deciding what happens next.

The Archive keeps the past.

You get to keep moving.

THE HEARTSTONE IS THE DOOR

If you have been reading Mystic Dragonfly Creations and wondering where this strange collection of stones, stories, paintings, dragonflies, fire, discoveries and questions actually begins, there is an answer.

Begin with the Heartstone.

Ignivar’s Heartstone: How One Forgotten Stone Awakened the Dragonfly Archive is Book One of The Dragonfly Journals.

It began with a real object.

Then came the questions.

Then came the story.

Book One is the first doorway into the mythology behind everything you see growing here.

If these essays have made you curious about the Archive, I would love for you to step through that door.

BEGIN WITH BOOK ONE

Ignivar’s Heartstone:
How One Forgotten Stone Awakened the Dragonfly Archive

By April Louann Mitchell

Book One of The Dragonfly Journals

Read or buy on Amazon:
https://a.co/d/0f2LW1rA

Explore The Dragonfly Journals:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/pages/the-dragonfly-journals

Signed copies are available directly through Mystic Dragonfly Creations.

ALREADY READ BOOK ONE?

Then I have a different invitation for you.

Tell me what you thought.

Leave an honest review.

Reviews matter enormously to independent authors because they help the next person standing outside the door decide whether to open it.

You do not need to write an essay.

You do not need to tell people what you think you are supposed to say.

Tell the truth.

What stayed with you?

What surprised you?

What did you love?

What question did the book leave behind?

Even a few honest sentences can help another reader discover a book they otherwise might never have found.

That is another way the Archive grows.

One reader hands the story to another.

COME SPEND AN AFTERNOON WITH ME

And if you are anywhere near Galveston, Texas, I would love something even more.

Come spend an afternoon with me.

On Sunday, September 27, 2026, from 2:00 to 5:00 PM, we are gathering at Herb & Smudge Apothecary in Galveston for:

AN AFTERNOON TEA WITH THE DRAGONFLY JOURNALS

There will be tea.

There will be handcrafted finger foods.

There will be music.

There will be books.

There will be artwork.

There will be natural discoveries from the Archive.

There will be questions.

There will probably be stories I did not intend to tell until somebody asks exactly the right thing.

Bring your copy if you already have one.

Pick one up there if you don’t.

Come ask me about the Heartstone.

Ask me about Ignivar.

Ask me about the rocks.

Ask me what I still don’t know.

Come see some of the objects behind the stories.

Come sit down.

Have tea.

Spend a little time inside this strange world I have been building.

Because the Dragonfly Archive was never meant to become a place people only scroll past.

I want it to become a place where people connect.

September 27 event details:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/pages/afternoon-tea-book-signing-the-dragonfly-journals

Facebook event:
https://www.facebook.com/share/18t3fbdztx/?mibextid=wwXIfr

COME AS A READER. LEAVE AS PART OF THE ARCHIVE.

Maybe that is what I want most.

Not simply customers.

Readers.

People who ask questions.

People who notice things.

People who tell me what they found.

People who bring their own stories.

People who pick up something strange and immediately think:

April would want to see this.

People who read Book One and hand it to somebody else.

People who return to the blog.

People who watch Ignivar grow.

People who see the next painting.

People who follow the next discovery.

People who become part of the circle.

Discovery.

Curiosity.

Story.

Book One.

Book Two.

Connection.

Archive.

Return.

Share.

New Reader.

And then the circle begins again.

NO REGRETS

I cannot change yesterday.

Neither can you.

Perhaps that is not the tragedy we sometimes imagine it to be.

Because we still have today.

We still have choices that have not been made.

People we have not met.

Places we have not seen.

Paintings that have not been painted.

Stories that have not been written.

Books that have not been read.

Questions that have not been asked.

There are stones still beneath the Earth that have not yet reached the surface.

There are dragonflies that have not yet crossed our path.

There are mornings we have not awakened to.

There are versions of ourselves we have not met.

The past is real.

Keep the parts worth keeping.

Learn from the parts worth studying.

Take responsibility for what belongs to you.

Put down what does not.

And then turn around.

There is still a future over there.

THE ARCHIVE WILL REMEMBER

Maybe that is the comfort of an Archive.

I do not have to carry everything every minute in order for it to have mattered.

The story can exist without becoming the only story.

The memory can remain without becoming the address where I live.

The lesson can remain without requiring the wound to stay open.

The past can have a shelf.

It does not need the whole building.

There are new things coming through the door.

New questions.

New readers.

New paintings.

New stories.

New discoveries.

New mornings.

And I want to be present for them.

FORWARD

A dragonfly can fly backward.

It can hover.

It can circle.

It can change direction.

So can we.

But the dragonfly does not need to return to yesterday to prove that yesterday happened.

Neither do I.

Neither do you.

When there is something left to learn, look back.

When you need rest, land.

When you need another perspective, circle.

When the wind changes, adjust.

And when you finally know there is nothing left behind you that requires your presence:

Turn toward the open air.

The Archive has the record.

You have a life to live.

The stone remains.

The fire remembers.

The Archive keeps the story.

The dragonfly moves.

AVRILIS

CONTINUE THE JOURNEY

Begin with Book One:

Ignivar’s Heartstone:
How One Forgotten Stone Awakened the Dragonfly Archive

Amazon:
https://a.co/d/0f2LW1rA

The Dragonfly Journals:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/pages/the-dragonfly-journals

Explore the Dragonfly Archive:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/collections/frontpage

September 27 Afternoon Tea with The Dragonfly Journals:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/pages/afternoon-tea-book-signing-the-dragonfly-journals

Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/share/18t3fbdztx/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Return to the Mystic Dragonfly Blog:
https://mysticdragonflycreations.com/blogs/news

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

This piece is about the difference between looking back to learn and living backward because we still feel we have something to prove.

What are you ready to stop proving? Is there a part of your past you can honor without carrying it into every day that comes next? What does moving forward mean to you right now?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below. I personally read your comments and, whenever I can, respond and continue the conversation with you.

You don’t need to have everything figured out. A question, a sentence, or one honest thought is enough. 

The story doesn’t have to end when the article does.

— APRIL LOUANN MITCHELL
Mystic Dragonfly Creations