Dragonfly Dreams

The symbolism behind a dragonfly is that of strength, transformation and protection to name a few. Many cultures hold them in high regard and view their presence as good luck. The spiritual symbolism surrounding them is that of hope and possibility and breaking free from all those things that hold us back, helping us to achieve our dreams.

We are often asked how we got started with our wedding and event venue. This is the story behind our “Dragonfly Dream” and how we got started in the hospitality industry.

My name is Lyndsey Greenland and I own and operate Rolling Rails Lodge with my family. Our wedding and event venue is located in the mountains of central Pennsylvania just ten minutes from Penn State University. We currently host over 45 events each year with the majority of our events being weddings. The wedding industry is relatively new to us, we didn’t get our start in the hospitality field. My husband, Shaun, and his family started in the construction industry 30 some years ago and by the end of 2015, family discussions on eventual retirement from this laborious field of work were starting to happen more and more often. Construction is a difficult line of work, one that the body can’t withstand in the later years of life, so we turned our attention to what life would look after we hung it up. We knew construction and we had some experience with real estate from leasing a few long term apartment rentals in town. While my husband and his family knew construction and real estate, I had spent over ten years in the medical field working as a Registration Associate in the local outpatient and emergency room departments, my background was in customer service. Building a wedding venue was never really on our radar but the idea started to gain momentum after attending several weddings for the better part of 2008 through 2015. That was the time when a lot of our friends and family were getting married and we had been to all of the venues in the area. The idea that we could actually design and build a wedding venue of our very own starting taking hold. In 2016, we purchased land and built the dream. Disclaimer: this dream was 100% financed by the bank, it was well beyond our reach, but the bank took a chance on us based solely on a high credit score and rental property assets. Our local building material store also took a chance on us, loaning us material to start the build without the ability to pay right away. A friend and previous customer did the same, offering up blind support of our dream and loaned us a great deal of money, “pay me back when you can”. We are forever grateful to all of them. We owed a lot of money, an uncomfortable amount of money, we handed over pink slips for our construction equipment and work trucks and handed out “IOUs” like candy. We had no clue what we were doing but we knew how to design and build a structure. That’s all we needed right? “Build it and they will come” that infamous motto was at the forefront of our minds, but little did we know, we were in over heads so-to-speak in the world of hospitality. We made promises to host weddings for the following year before even breaking ground on the venue. We offered up sketch drawings of the venue and trekked potential clients through the woods and pointed out to the views of the rolling hills on our mountainside property. “Just picture…envision it.. trust us, this will be spectacular…”. Those aren’t phrases to throw around lightly when dealing with arguably the most important day of someone’s life. But we did, we made our bed, we forced a hard deadline, and it was time to get to work. No strangers to working hard, my husband and his father hit the ground running, designing and sending blueprints to a local log kit manufacturer. The dream of a lodge wedding venue was starting to become a reality.

We constructed the venue through the winter of 2017, lucking out with amazing weather. We hit 75 degrees in February during the week we framed the massive roof trusses. However, the building process wouldn’t always be that smooth and we hit several bumps in the road. Fear, doubt, exhaustion, it was all so overwhelming. Every day that we pulled up to the construction site was another gut punch reminder of how much we still had to do, and the possibility of catastrophic failure was very real.

It was June 14, 2017. Our first wedding was three days away and I was in full blown panic mode, so much to do and so little time. I was corresponding with the bride assuring her that we would be done in time, but I really knew I was just trying to reassure myself. On that day in the midst of our panic, Shaun and I were standing in the middle of the main hall of the venue trying to entertain our two young toddlers at the time when Shaun’s dad hollered across the venue. “Hey guys, look what I found!” He held out his hand and there it was, the dragonfly.

I had never seen a dragonfly up close like that, it was magnificent with its big blue eyes and bright green body. It was incredible, and at the time I remember thinking, is this a sign? Are we going to be okay, is it all going to work out? I leaned into that thought and I told myself it had to be a sign. This was our sign from the universe, from source, from God, whatever you want to call it. We were going to be okay, and we were on the right path.

I won’t lie, over the next 72 hours the skeptic in me started to take over and the idea that the dragonfly visit being anything more than mere coincidence started to dominate my thoughts as the “to do list” grew. That was until I realized that the dragonfly image kept popping up everywhere I looked in those days leading up to the wedding. The guest cabin, now known as the Delaney House, had dragonfly magnets plastered all over the screen doors. They were placed there by the previous owner of the cabin and I never really took notice to them before. Additionally, while cleaning the venue just 24 hours before the wedding, I took a sip from our water fountain and quickly glanced down to find a knot in the wood that was in the perfect shape of a dragonfly. There are thousands of knots in the pine wood walls of our venue, but this stood out like a flashing neon light shouting “YES IT WAS A SIGN, IT’S ALL GOING TO WORK OUT!”

Well it did work out, we had our first wedding three days later on June 17, 2017. Miraculously we got everything done in time, the wedding was beautiful and the couple was thrilled. Check, check and check, phew! Since then we have hosted over 300 weddings and events at our venue and are still figuring out the world of hospitality as we go. We are still learning, still setting unbelievably hard deadlines and expectations for ourselves, still surviving huge set backs (thanks Covid-19) but still loving the journey.

According to author Jill Gleeson “Dragonflies also can specifically symbolize self-awareness, self-love and embracing your own personal power… ” I always wanted to chronicle our path of dreaming big, jumping in headfirst and figuring it out as we go in the world of hospitality and weddings. I know I’m late to the game, as we have been hosting events for over seven years now but I am by nature a very shy and private person. This is a start, and I’m taking that leap and putting myself out there. Prior to this, jumping into big dreams headfirst with my confident and passionate “Leo” of a husband has always been easier. I have always supported him in the background, and he goes out and conquers whatever he sets his mind to with impeccable work ethic and unwavering self-belief. I always did the work behind the scenes and let him take the lead. As a Pisces, my M.O. has always been to creatively imagine up the biggest most magnificent dreams and then self-doubt those dreams to death. I’m working on it, slowly, but I’ve come to realize that the hospitality industry, the wedding industry and life in general are all the same, you do your best and you figure it out as you go. I’m learning to become more self-aware, embracing the unfamiliar territory of self-love and finally acknowledging that maybe I am stronger than I ever realized. This blog is another “dragonfly dream”, I’ve always wanted to write but never had the courage. Fear of failure, ridicule and falling short of perfection still loom large in the back of my mind but I’m going to give it a try despite all of those fears. The posts on this blog will cover weddings of course but I also want to go deeper and write about our journey. My hope for all of you reading this is that you go after those dragonfly dreams. I hope you can embrace the beauty in not only the wins but also the failures along the way because there will be many of those too, but it’s worth it.