My horticultural education deepens this semester with a Horticultural Taxonomy class, focusing on weeds. Florida is good at weeds. I am good at finding Florida's weeds--AND taking pictures of them close up. I'm working at getting better at taking pictures of them far away. This flower has the diameter of your littlest finger nail. It's called Wire Weed.
This is one that I worked with today. The vibrant green of the bee was just so startling that it caught me attention from way across the front yard. The plant (called "Moses in a Basket") has been damaged by the freezing bits of weather we've experienced--but the flower opened, the bee came, and I took a photograph.
FROM AN EMAIL I SENT TODAY TO LAUREN:
I've been reading your blogs from the last months--you have a distinctive feeling to your prose. Meg thinks that the up-beat cheerfulness is because the blogs are a "happy place" for you. I think that she is right. I know that spending time writing on my blogs sets me free from reality. I can see how people can get lost in the cyber world and never want to come back to work and conflict and chores and debts and a mortal body that can neither make things right with a wave of a hand nor fly effortlessly above the city [--over the power lines but lower than the helicopters]. I suppose that any kind of retreat from reality--drugs, alcohol, video games, Facebook, even just the draw of sitting for hours reading a favorite book--kind of makes your re-entry into the human place a bumpy ride, at best.
I taught Relief Society last Sunday: Keeping the Sabbath day holy. I thought that I was all prepared, but as I got further into the lesson it felt like I was just swimming around in circles--by the end of Church, a lot of us were crying, I was a nervous mess, and we had gone 5 minutes over time. I used the last of my lesson time to read an essay that I'd written after the flood in Texas . . . illustrating that the healing, rich influence of the Sabbath was one way that the Lord had given us to help us heal, allow us to become stronger, appreciate what we have a little more. There was one line--something about I had been given so much, that having lost what I had--I still more than most people would ever get during their whole lives. The more that I look back on what I've experienced, the more everything seems to converge on one thing: we only value and act upon principles that are in motion some place where we can see and understand them. At the end of the movie "Hogfather", Death speaks with his granddaughter about why it is so important for mortals to have hope and faith. He tells her that children need to begin by believing in the little lies: the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, the Hogfather, so that they can be ready to believe the big lies: kindness, faith, moral values, obedience and joy. It sounded so strange to me, but Death reminds his granddaughter that if he took all of the matter in the universe and ground it up into a powder that he could never find one molecule of love, one atom of honesty. If we do not make these "lies" real--then they disappear. While I know that the moral truths of the Gospel exist independent of this Earth's existance--we are only able to have them in our lives if we make them "come true". After all, Satan will be bound for a thousand years during the Millennium NOT because he will be literally be tied up, but because the people will be SO RIGHTEOUS that he will have no power over them.
That means that we can have the Millennium begin now. If I choose to "give up all my sins" and keep the covenants that I have made with God--following His counsel and being guided by his promptings: then Satan can have no control over me. It is overly simplistic, WAY yes. But I like the idea that I can make joy and gratitude exist simply by doing them myself. Without my actions, these eternal truths would still exist somewhere on their own--but I can have them made real for me just by deciding to live that kind of joyful and reassuring existence.
That's almost as good as flying.
