Looking Around – March 15th 2022
I went on a run that turned into a walk, but we’ll pretend that was on purpose because I was having a great time stopping and staring at shit along the park paths. About 3/4ths of the trees were still barren, but the last, interspersed quarter of them were blooming with the freshest of little green leaves, or long pink stalks of flowery plumage.
There’s this kind of tree that lives in front of my house but also all over Buffalo Bayou park that grows and drops these little pink flowers all throughout the spring and summer. They rain down on my car and fall into the front seat when I open the driver seat door sometimes – as a little treat. They grow like crazy and need to be completely pruned every summer, but it also means their many trunks separate and then conjoin back together occasionally. I found one incredible example today, but I forgot to take a picture.
The whole walk I was thinking about this book I’d been reading, Original Blessing by Matthew Fox, which I’m just starting, but is all about Creation Spirituality as a superior foil to Fall/Redemption Christianity. I couldn’t give you a synopsis right now but the first little chapter talks about noticing the word of God, specifically the words that came before humans invented words. The words of the birds, and the words of the plants as they grow and create from their vestiges of life. And especially the words of the dirt and the dust specs that accumulate in my room. And the cracking concrete, and the slushy mud snow on the side of the road. Each little, tiny part of everything is made of and made in the image of God’s word… apparently. So I’m told.
But damn, I had a good time looking through that lens. I realized that as I watched this blooming tree on top of the hill by Waugh and Memorial – I had this feeling of, why the absolute shit would I live buried in worries, when I could just look at the tiny little bajillion explosions of words coming out of this beautiful tree anytime I wanted! I then walked out across the bayou pedestrian bridge and looked down at all these little grasses thriving sparsely in the muddy bank where the water had receded past. All I could think was, gat damn, these little guys are going crazy out here! Words are being excreted and unfolded and plopped on top of each other by the billions every second, these little weeds don’t even know there’s a war going on. Poor Ukraine.
Spring really doesn’t give a shit, and maybe in some way God doesn’t really give a shit that I thought shits were worth giving on a day like today – because shit! Shit is growing again! The absolutely abundant loveliness of that one tree and one riverbank made it easy to extrapolate how widely beauty and blessings outnumber the cruelness of the world and the newsfeed. Sorry! It was too obvious! Wasn’t even close!
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