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Why I Don't Wear Wings

A while back, a dear friend of mine gave me a pair of green dragon wings--the kind of thing you find at goth stores or renaissance faires, with scaly detailing and little backpack-like straps so you can wear them around. I'd wanted a pair for several years, and so was delighted to finally have some. They were beautiful, and people liked them. I liked them. I loaned them out to friends, who drew compliments from many people. I wore them on Halloween, and had a great deal of fun.

I believe I have a pair of wings--spiritual ones, maybe--but they're there. I've had friends who do things with auras actually see them, and describe them to me in perfect detail--before they really knew I was a dragon. (As she said: "Oh, that explains the wings.") If that's not 'there,' then I don't know what is.

That's why I was so confused when I realized that I didn't want to wear these wings. Or, I gradually realized, a tail...or any other thing generally accepted as "part of a dragon". Nor did I want to go to the other extreme and get radical body modification surgery.

I thought about it for a while, as I do with things that puzzle me.

I realized, first, that I'm very picky about my images of dragons. I don't have many t-shirts with dragons on them, or many posters. I've got a few sculptures, but they're either ones I've made myself, ones that have been gifted to me, or ones that have distinguished themselves somehow from the great load of dragon-related memorabilia and kipple that's out there. I can't just see something with a dragon on it and go, "ooh, pretty!" It's got to make me feel that there's something essentially draconic about it for me to want it around, reminding me of who and what I am.

This, of course, led me to wonder what, exactly, I meant by "draconic." There's lots of different definitions out there. For some, it's power, sheer and raw. For others, it's beauty, cuteness, magic, grace, or some amalgam of any and all of these things.

For me, draconity is a state of mind that is functional. It is defined by its use.
Please don't misunderstand: I don't want to be some scaled version of the thought police: "you're not thinking in the right way, so you're not a dragon." It's more like some essays I've read: what difference does your being a dragon, your thinking "like a dragon" (in whatever way you think dragons ought to think or be), make in your life? Does it make any difference at all? For me, it makes a lot of difference. It's changed how I talk to people, how I interact with others, what I think about God and how I view nature. And that's only the big stuff, for starters.

For me, draconity is a state of mind that is functional. It is defined by its use.
If that last bit explained what "state" meant in that sentence, this is going to be about what "mind" and "functional" mean. First, "mind." Note that draconity is not (and, actually, has never been) a state of body for me. There was a brief period of my life when I thought it might have been, but I was still working things out. Would I like wings? Sure. I want to fly. But do I need them, or need to feel mopey about their absence in this body, to feel that I am a dragon? No. This body is functional for what I need it to be, just as my soul and spirit function as what they are. Do I need to have wings, a tail, in this body to function fully and completely as a dragon? No. Therefore, I realized, why add them on? I don't need it to function, either in body or in spirit.

Adding something that I really don't need and can't use to augment my sense of self is an antithesis of what being a dragon is, for me (yes, there are others. No, I'm not going into them here). Therefore, wings, tails, and other things become paraphernalia to me. They're neither useful (no matter how hard I try, I can't fly with fabric wings, or even the current experimental prosthetics) or necessary. If I wore them, I would be setting limits on my being, and defining myself by what I didn't have.