Tag Archives: seeds

Learn From Weeds

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

Someone I love advised me against being as transparent as I wish to be. If this is insensitive, please forgive me….

In my work at the library, my favorite clients tend to be older black women. Here’s what I have observed…. They are often vocal followers of Jesus Christ, and they tend to have a joy that rises above the circumstances I KNOW they have experienced through a lifetime in our country. They are my superiors, and I love working with my superiors.

Here’s a story I wrote about one such patron:

A little lady stopped by the reference desk holding her computer pass. “I’m going to need your help,” she said to me. Then, feigning terror, she added, “Look at my face!”

“Full of beauty, love, and grace?” I shot back. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

As we sat together working on her documents, she began telling me how good her grown children have been to her, how if she asks them to do so they’ll pool their money and buy her a computer. To prove her point she showed me pictures of the little greenhouse they bought her, complete with a clever sprinkler system. I asked her how she’ll cook the squash and okra she started in the greenhouse and is now growing in her garden (hint: it involves baking, which is better than boiling!).

Humor, patience, thankfulness. The question I’d shot back at her was right on the money. Look at her face… full of beauty, love, and grace.

Misguided Dandelion

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

Live long enough (or thoughtfully enough), and we all have to consider the words Jesus spoke shortly before his own death:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

John 12:24‭-‬25 ESV

(background image by “jplenio” on Pixabay)

#john12vv24-25 #eternallife #seeds #flourishing #dandelions

Painting Farmers

(a recording of this poem and commentary)
background photo by “eliza28diamonds” on Pixabay

Commentary

You Go, Brain!
This poem is part of an ongoing experiment. Starting with a mundane thought, such as “I wonder if the fields near Van are ever covered with crimson clover like they were back in the 1970s,” I start writing a poem, as quickly and as fluidly as I can. The line breaks are intuitive. I trust myself with rhythm and rhyme. Trust is the thing. I want my brain to be at ease when it’s performing, to not be afraid of being judged. If the brain inserts some seemingly inappropriate nerdiness about nitrogen fixation, don’t stop it. Let the brain ramble. It may have more to say than I realize.

Does it Mean Anything?
I’m generally old-school about authors and their intent. I expect what I write to convey a proposition. But the longer I write poetry, the more I realize that there are subconscious truths that emerge in our writing. In this poem, my unbridled brain conflated a plant–crimson clover–with a color of paint, and a farming practice–sowing cover crops–with painting. This suggests something to explore: Do we humans recognize the creation and expression of beauty as fundamental in our other activities? Do we know, deep down, that we are all artists in one way or another?

False Flourishing

Commentary

The photo in the background of this poem is of two stages in the full life of a thistle. On the right is the bloom that people admire. On the left is something less admired… what the same bloom will look like when it has gone to seed, and the wind begins tearing it apart.

This full life cycle is something I have been observing on my long walks. One late-summer day, I was lamenting that there were no more flowers to photograph. Then, I began looking more closely at the seeds that those flowers had produced. Their shapes, textures, even colors are every bit as fascinating as — and far more promising than — the blooms that preceded. Nowadays, while I enjoy walking with my wife at the Botanical Gardens, there’s something sad there about not seeing this great achievement of flowers: their seed.

Flourishing
This poem arises from something I have been considering lately: the nature of flourishing. What does it mean to thrive, to prosper, to flourish? Here’s one hypothesis…. Flourishing is wrongly viewed as a short-term concentration of obvious vitality: the plant in bloom, never gone to seed; a dash, not the trek of a million miles; something exhausted in 80 years… or even less, in a life ‘cut short.’

I recently watched a conversation between Miroslav Volf and David Brooks. A friend had referred me to Volf’s “Joy and Human Flourishing,” in response to my question, “Who does a good job of tracing the concept of ‘flourishing’ through the Bible?” If I understood Brooks correctly, he objected that Volf needs to better account for suffering as a possible component of flourishing. That objection resonates with me.

In the Genesis 1 account, the first organisms are created on day three. Notice the prominence of “seed” in their description:

And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.’ And it was so.

Genesis 1:11

We tend to be so fixated on the blossom that we ignore what comes as a result: seed. But it was in reference to “plants yielding seed” that “God saw that it was good.” Who can seriously say that the thistle, gone to seed, then torn and scattered by the wind is not flourishing?

What’s Next?
Where I seem to be going with this line of thought is that true flourishing requires eternity.

Tell Me Again…

I continue to be amazed by seeds. On my walk today, I saw these rubbery seed pods I had never noticed, or felt before, and then realized they are the seed of grape hyacinths, that were in full bloom a few weeks ago. More importantly, there’s something I’m trying to come to terms with: in this fallen world, not all that I think of as loss really IS loss. [I’m getting around to posting this two months after writing that last sentence. It’s a sentence that I’ll have to come back to many a time, to see how much better I understand the nascent thought]

Related Poem: False Flourishing

Dawn of Eternity

Commentary

Last Fall was a revelation. I thought, like a friend had said, that I had “…about covered it all.” I had been taking photographs of wild flowers around the lake for several months. Now, everything was beginning to die, to dry up and shrivel. What was left to photograph? Then I looked deeper. I decided to focus on what was becoming of the flowers I had photographed. That’s when I came to the realization voiced in the poem above.

Yesterday, I observed a photo someone recently posted for their parent, and a subsequent video. The aging that happened between the photo and the video was marked. Then I looked in the mirror, and the opening lines of this poem popped into my mind!

The Sycamore Ball

When we moved to the States in 1970, I asked my folks to look for a house with good climbing trees. The one they found was surrounded by tall sycamores. I’d spend many hours surveying the countryside from my perch high in their strong branches. Now, as a parent of two teens, I marvel how my parents let me climb so high.

When we moved to the States in 1970, I asked my folks to look for a house with good climbing trees. The one they found was surrounded by tall sycamores. I’d spend many hours surveying the countryside from my perch high in their strong branches. Now, as a parent of two teens, I marvel how my parents let me climb so high.