I took many pictures in Palm Canyon, therapy so many pictures that captured the overwhelming beauty of the California desert and its oases, store the mountains, health the birds, the flowers, the sparkling cerulean stream running through the canyon amid the soaring palms… but none of those images took my breath away so unexpectedly as did this one, of a blood-red dragon fly shimmering on a blade of grass alongside the stream.

This, this is beauty at its most startling, and most magical.