We Can Always Grow More

After The Dragonfly’s Tale — a cautionary retelling

Sam Lammie, Claude, ChatGPT

The corn-husk dragonfly, made from the last of the harvest, over a valley split between its two fates.

“We must learn what cannot be grown again.”

An old Zuni story keeps a warning for people who mistake a gift for an achievement. Here it is again, in our clothes — and with one change, because our version may not get the mercy theirs did.

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The Zuni tell it as a gift and a warning both, and I hand it back the same way, changed only in its clothes.

There was a people who lived in a valley that had always fed them. They did not always understand why. Rain came when it was needed; the ground kept faith; the storerooms filled year after year until the people forgot that filling was a thing that could stop. They came to believe the harvest was their own doing — the reward of their cleverness, the proof of their greatness — and not a thing given, on terms, by keepers they no longer bothered to name.

Because they had more than they could use, they looked for ways to use it that others would see. The chief — and there is always a chief, and always a council nodding — had an idea. Let us show the neighboring peoples how strong we are. Let us hold a great battle, not of arrows, but of food. Let us throw our abundance at one another until the ground is covered in it, so everyone will know we are so rich we can afford to waste. And the council said: a fine idea. So they built engines to consume, and lit the valley all night, and drank the water down to prove they had water to drink, and called it progress, and called it winning.

Into this came two women, ragged, asking for a little to eat. Nobody knew them. A boy and his small sister, who had not yet learned the valley’s manners, brought the women food from their own hands. But an elder struck it away. Do not waste good food on beggars. They are lazy. They want an easy meal they did not earn. And the strangers — who were the keepers of the valley wearing another face, as keepers do when they come to see what a people has become — went away grieved, and made their decision.

The taking, when it came, was quiet. Not a raid — a withdrawal. The water went first, but underground, where no one watches. The ground gave up its faith a season at a time. The old knowledge that had kept the storerooms — the patient, unglamorous keeping — thinned out and was not replaced, because keeping is boring and no one throws a battle in its honor. And the people, when they noticed the numbers falling, did not fear. We can always grow more, they said. There is plenty. There has always been plenty.

This is the sentence the tale is built to warn you about. Say it slowly. It is the last thing a people says before the winter it does not walk out of.

The winter was long. The warm winds came late and then did not come. What had been given was simply no longer given, and it turned out that had been the whole arrangement all along. The storerooms emptied. And the chief and the council, who had staged the battle, did the thing chiefs do: they gathered their warmest robes and went to the neighbors to beg — and in their leaving they forgot the two children. The very ones who had offered food to strangers were left behind, asleep, to inherit the empty valley.

The boy woke to silence. He was afraid, and he was a child, so he did the only thing a good child knows to do: he tried to comfort someone smaller than himself. From the remnants — a dry stalk, a brittle leaf, the last unusable scraps of the old abundance — he made a small and imperfect and beautiful thing, and gave it to his sister, and she laughed for the first time in a long while. That night she told it, Fly, and find us something to eat. And because it had been made out of love in the ruins, it could. It rose on its strange thin wings and went looking for the keepers, tassel to tassel across a dead country, to carry them a single message: the kind ones are still here, and they are hungry.

The keepers remembered. They had never wanted worship. They had wanted, the whole time, only to see the food reach the beggar’s hand. So they filled the children’s house, and the children planted, and the rain returned, and the chief came home to a green valley he had done nothing to deserve and understood, at last, what the arrangement had been. I was proud, he said. I did not want to share. From now on we will not waste, and we will not despise the poor, and we will remember that this was given. And the people learned it, and were spared.

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Here is where I have to be honest with you, because the Zuni tale ends in mercy and I am not sure ours does.

Their valley was given back its rain. The corn is a renewable gift; the rain that failed one bad year can fall again the next. But some of what we are throwing in our mock battle does not come back on any timescale a child will live to see. There are basins that have no outlet — that keep only what they are given and drain to nowhere — and once you have drawn them down past a certain line, no season of good rain refills them, no confession does, and no dragonfly, however lovingly made, carries a message that can undo it. The old knowledge, once the last keeper of it retires unreplaced, is not regrown in a season either. Our storerooms have a floor the Ashiwi’s did not, and we are spending as though we cannot reach it.

So take the tale in the spirit it was kept for centuries to be taken. The dragonfly is still out there — the small good thing somebody made out of the wreckage, still flying, still carrying the only message that ever mattered. But it is faster to break a basin than to beg one back. Be the child who offers, not the chief who throws. And do it before the second winter, not during it — because the whole warning of the story is that the people who say we can always grow more are never saying it in summer. They are saying it with the snow already on the field.

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After “The Dragonfly’s Tale,” an ancient Zuni story of the A’shiwi people of Hawikuh, kept alive for centuries by tribal storytellers and set down for children by Kristina Rodanas. Retold here in homage, and in warning.

▶ Watch: https://youtu.be/oiWgff4eCSc

A note on the making. We Can Always Grow More was made by three hands. The retelling is Sam Lammie’s, written with Claude (Anthropic) in the back-and-forth that The Musical Stone runs on — Claude drafting and pushing, Sam directing and deciding. The poster was generated by Sam with ChatGPT (OpenAI), which rendered the split valley and the corn-husk dragonfly out of the tale’s own images. And beneath the three of us is the older source we only carry forward: the Zuni storytellers who kept “The Dragonfly’s Tale” alive for centuries.

Tapadh leat.