I continue taking pictures of wildflowers. Some are so small the blooms are hardly visible. I’m getting a bit crazy, finding the tiniest blooms possible. My vision is getting microscopic. It’s interesting trying to write about a flower without colonizing it, making it mine instead of letting it be itself.
Cultivate your own garden, was what Candide at last decided to do. Look after what’s nearby and the world will take care of itself. Yeah. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” as Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises. He added that line at the last minute.
While the world does a terrible job of taking care of itself, it is comforting to watch the plants open their tiny, maybe profuse, blooms and take care of themselves and the bees and the butterflies that way. Looking closely makes me feel like a child again, when I was a lot closer to the earth. Do you ever feel that you’re rounding back down, even if your back may still be straight as an arrow? My mind seems to be softening its barriers somehow so that long ago times and people seem to be present as much as recent ones. Changes in brain connectivity, I read.
Which brings me to Facebook. I have recently been more in touch with people I went to high school with. I look at their pictures and think, yes, that’s right. That’s who she is. Who she was. I feel that I am there, and I look at pictures of my children when they were young, their father, too, and I think I am there also. On Facebook, I see people I haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years and it seems as if we are still in the same room together.
Time is strange and ambiguous. Jerry is all for clocks, lots of them. He likes to look at his watch for no reason other than to connect himself to the passing of time. I don’t like clocks. I like the sense of drifting. He is more responsible in that way, maybe, but my way feels somehow more true. I’m here, at 9:08 a.m. and I’m everywhere else, all times included. In this way I connect myself to wildflowers, who understand time in terms of sun/no sun, or spring or summer or fall.
Not the words but the feel of the air, the rains, the tucking in of roots to the soil. Not the word soil, but the feel of being surrounded at the base, I guess.
As I get older there is a dropping away of a certain kind of distinction and an elevation of other kinds. Maybe you know what I mean. Like the way present and past seem to meld together.
I look at the old albums of days at the lake before I was born and I feel that I was there. I’ve seen those photos many times. Maybe I just sucked up the information and imagined myself in them. Or maybe time isn’t what we’ve thought. Eugene O'Neill said, interestingly, 'There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.'
St. Augustine wrote “There's no sense in asking what God did before creation because time itself is a creature. God, as for Boethius, is in eternal present.” He also wrote, “We cannot measure past and future because they don’t exist.”
A few days ago I saw the tiniest flower behind the cottage. Now that I’ve been looking so hard, they show themselves to me. I just now went to take a picture and since then it had produced a sequence of blooms. I thought it was a tiny secret, but it just wasn’t through becoming itself. But even as it was doing that, the lower blooms have begun to wither. At what point is it “itself”? I’m pretty sure it’s a Broad-leaved Helleborine Orchid. Fancy name for such a modest flower.
P.S. Thank you to those who emailed me requesting to be added to the mailing list! I should mention more often that this is possible. I love knowing who’s out there reading.