A few mornings ago, I had begun my yoga practice and happened to glance over to my left. There was a beautiful flower, protruding from a wall of greenery, like a head peering out from the break in a verdant curtain, wanting my attention and looking right at me. Being seriously compulsive about my routine, I finished downward facing dog and then went outside in my naked yoga outfit and took a picture of this muted and perfect face. I came back in and finished my daily menu of poses.
I am always thinking about writing and while I have often been influenced by wherever I happened to find myself, what had just happened was a first for me. This flower of the dragon fruit lives for around twenty-four hours and the next time you see it, it looks like a sagging, dead tassel of straw colored strings. It’s like it was too beautiful to be real.
This world we live in is filled with an infinite number of miracles, absolutely too much for any mind to comprehend. How many flowers bloom at exactly the same second in this world? How many eaglets crack their eggs at the same moment, with their mothers hovering over them, in trees high about the ground? I have been thinking about that flower for days and wondering how I could possibly give it the meaning it begs from me.
I grew up in Queens, NY and my connection to nature’s elegant magnificence was not a part of my life back in the Fifties. Trees poking out of sidewalks and patches of lawn were not the stuff of John Muir. Our president grew up in Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood with bigger trees, lawns and oversized homes, but not far from me and around the same time. Love of nature was not part of my upbringing and I am guessing money was the mantra of his household, while mine had more to do with just getting by.
I am trying to think about when I first got away from urban living for any extended time and it had to be sleep away camp. My brother would have a better memory of the details, but I don’t want to bother him and make this into a research piece, because it feels more like my personal poem about nature’s incomprehensible beauty. I was around ten and camp was the first time experiencing something called homesickness, missing the familiar world of home. We lived in bunks and had counselors and daily scheduled activities. We had a lake and woods and cricket symphonies at night.
There were always young people, who fell in love with nature and went camping, as soon as they could leave home without parental supervision. I was a late bloomer and it wasn’t until I left New York City in my early forties that I discovered it was actually God, who created earth, because there was no other possible explanation. I moved to northern New Mexico and I remember the first time I caught a glimpse of the earth colored mesas in the crystal clear distance and I cried and I cried. From that moment on, I nursed a love for a kind of beauty that is so incredible, it defies any expression, as hard as art tries to capture it.
Over the years, I have learned that time paints a canvas of experience with a palette of colors that only time can mix. No, the last thing I want to be is a geriatric elitist, but the more you see and experience, the greater the subtleties. Nature’s infinite beauty means more to me now than it ever did before.
One night, I was at the Pink Adobe, a hangout for locals in Santa Fe. I was my usual uncomfortable self in places like that, nursing the first of who knows how many margaritas and struck up a conversation with a hippie geologist. She introduced me to camping, something that was completely foreign to me. You set up a tent in the mountains and there is no one within sight or sound. Much to my amazement, I got into it and it even got to a point where I would go out into the foothills of the Rockies, hours and hours away, just me and my three dogs.
Maybe if I grew up a country boy, I would take the outdoors for granted. Life has this way of taking you on a path it knew all along, but you are the last to find out about it. Seeing that flower several mornings ago, quietly spoke to my delinquent Zen practice and I’ve been thinking about how perfect the natural world is. It’s like this incomprehensibly, intricate symphony, with trillions and trillions of moving parts, a harmony that could only be the voice of God.
We should revere it, be mesmerized by it and dance with it and yet we don’t. When I camped, I always felt like a guest, a part of something so much more than myself. I brought up the president, because I was at least geographically close enough to his world to understand the distance from nature.
I think when you grow up with privilege, you are taught that everything was placed on earth for your benefit, at least I’ll bet that’s what Fred told Donald. You take from others and you certainly take from the land, because she has no voice, raping her at will with no fear of repercussions.
The dragon fruit flower that reached out from behind the green curtain got my attention and she wanted me to tell you that we are perpetrating a killing disharmony within nature’s beautiful symphony of miracles. The chorus of climate change seems to be falling on deaf ears, too stuffed with money to hear the screams of a suffering planet.
Here on Kauai, we are surrounded by a kind of beauty that defies description. Holding that timeless palette of too many colors, I could never do justice to her beauty. I am not sure what we do now, but we can’t keep abusing our home. The joke is on us, because we haven’t figured out that we will be the casualties of our greed. That precious flower has bloomed for millennia, but we may not be around to see it. In her beautiful, silent voice, she was telling me to pay much more attention to her.