Part 6: Love in the time of Corona
Nature, how can you be so oblivious?
Your stretched-out days.
Your sun-baked scent of hollyhocks, jasmine and all their perfumed relations dancing in the gentle breeze.
Your tulip trees thrusting their petals skyward one day; littering the ground with them the next.
Don’t you know we are in “unprecedented times”?
We are worried, stressed, and all forms of grief-stricken, and you just go your merry way, apparently glad to have a break from our constant pounding.
My dogs (talk about oblivious!) patrol their usual routes around the neighborhood, training their combined 500 million scent receptors on the earth’s emerging micro smells that we mere humans will never know.
My 2-year-old nephew swings an over-sized golf club in his front yard like a back-handed hockey stick, occasionally making contact with the ball, occasionally scraping the clubface against the adjacent sidewalk.
A zealous bird outside my bedroom window trumpets the arrival of morning at 5 a.m., when there is only a rumor of a glimmer of light on the horizon.
The Mountain, cloaked in her voluptuous white gown, dares us not to stare at her.
The line between cruelty and love can be rather thin sometimes. These members of the natural world: animal, vegetable and mineral…. it’s not that they don’t care. They don’t even know.
They tell us that love comes through realities outside the dominant crush of our own.
Their obliviousness, indeed, is a gift of love.