Here's something I need a word for. I'm calling it “piggyback”, but the more I say it the more it seems wrong. It’s when a plant growing beneath another sends up a bloom that appears to be from the wrong plant. It’s a common phenomenon. I’m finding it more and more as I pay attention. The most common culprit in this area is a variety of oxalis. A neighbor with this beautiful weed growing lusciously in his garden gave me the name. He hoes around it, until it gets out of hand, allowing it to bloom. It forms a beautiful yellow blanket that rivals the California poppy. Sometimes the yellow takes your breath away. But it has a tendency to piggyback.
Here are a few examples.
This seems to be a succulent in bloom, except the succulents are already blooming. There is no trace of the double shamrock leaves. Just a single bloom with more on the way.
This looks innocent enough. Lots of green leaves and a handful of yellow flowers. Except that not one leaf has anything to do with yellow flowers. They have merely poked their heads up to bask in the sun.
Here they are not quite piggybacking. They are growing from under one plant and starting to overgrow an overturned brightly colored umbrella. Without the yellow, this would just be a jumble.
And here a white geranium blooming from a common succulent.
And finally, a clear example of piggybacking that I just discovered. It’s beneath my mail box. I was on my way to dialysis and was stunned by this purple bloom. I had never seen such a bloom on a succulent. Two days later, when I felt better, I took a serious look at the stem supporting it. It went down to a small plant, completely hidden, with long pointy leaves. The only visible portion was this collection of beautiful flowers resting on succulent leaves. They have nothing to do with succulents. They are simply piggybacking.
This delightful flower is from a brick planter by the sidewalk of a nondescript building north of here. I generally have dinner at the Vets Hall on Mondays. So, once a week I take a different walk. Most of the people there are homeless and/or elderly. I, at least, am not homeless, but the majority of people I know here, and talk to, and have coffee with, are homeless. Most of them don’t like that term, so it’s not one I use very often. But most of them sleep under tarps and lead lives I would find depressing in the extreme. So I ended up having dinner with them on Mondays. It’s interesting to sit at a large table where I know almost everyone. The truth is, most days I see no one I recognize.
I’ve passed this planter many times on my way to dinner, but never once did anything capture my attention. Maybe nothing had bloomed until now. This flower and the lush green it sat above stopped me. Another fifty yards and there’s a drop to the harbor. But in less than half-a-block I turn right to the Vets Hall. I’ve never found anything interesting in this stretch.
As I’ve written before, a great deal of life is just pushing to get through. We push through the bland and the uninteresting to reach those moments that capture us. If I took this flower or a picture of this flower to the Vets Hall they would think it odd or peculiar. There would probably be jokes or odd remarks. I think it goes with the toughness of survival, with making do. One of them finds rocks that are “beautiful,” but walks past flowers and other things of beauty as if they weren’t there. I’m careful not to discuss this, because it might cause upset or an argument. Walking on egg shells is good advice. They see the world through their own limited lives, like most of us. Except that their lives seem more limited. They walk past planters of near perfection and see absolutely nothing.
Perhaps, if you think about it for a moment, you do the same.
This is not who I expected. He is friendly almost to a fault and meticulous in every swipe, the ground strewn not with piles of things, but with a mist of tiny flakes. Each decision seems a matter of life and death. On the 19th of January I wrote something about him in Topiary, pointing out that topiary is not just animal shapes, as I had thought, but all shapes, including geometrical. Of course, I had no idea who he was. I concluded that what he had accomplished was something mildly disturbing, “because [he] wanted [the plants] to be something other than they naturally are.” I suppose I’ve felt that way about plants for a very long time.
I remember a disturbing trend when I was young that involved trimming olive trees into balls or ovals or pompoms. Turning lush, leafy trees into sideshows. Olive trees can be held back by limiting their upward growth, but it takes a very skilled tree trimmer to hide his work. When the work is done, the tree is just as random and lush as it was when he began, but maybe a year or two younger. I used to think that people who made topiaries out of olive trees should be shot.
That’s a hard prejudice to overcome.
On the other hand, I helped my father turn elastic young pine trees into shapes that were compatible with Japanese style gardens. It was a process that required patience. Thick rubber coated wire was used to guide the branches. Unnecessary needles were picked. The tree grew slowly into a work of art. It became itself, or so we thought. Of course it had something to do with Zen, or Zen had something to do with it. But everything seemed very right.
So when I used the word “bonsai” to describe a shrub in a yard on my walk, I was misusing the word. Bonsais are very small. They are miniature trees in shallow pots. We, of course, were limiting the growth of small pine trees, so in an extended sense we were making bonsais, I suppose. Our Japanese vocabulary was limited. But when I wrote Bonsai and Bonsai 2, I thought that a huge tree had been made small, when in fact a shrub had been nurtured to grow very large. But it had not grown wild. It was like the olive tree that had been trimmed, but more severely.
The man I watched trimming this shrub last December behaved very much like the man in this photograph. He was friendly almost to a fault and meticulous in every swipe. Rather than with hedge sheers, however, he worked with a small hand tool, and other than the nature of their output, they might well have been the same person. Two gardens, one with and one without Zen. A load of similarities, but not exactly the same.
I’ve known geraniums most of my life. They were a standard feature of many of the homes we drove past on Sunday afternoons. These are definitely geranium leaves, but the flower, which is strangely impressive, did not strike me as being at all a geranium. Well, it turns out, according to Wikipedia, there are “422 species of flowering annual, biennial, and perennial [geraniums] that are commonly known as the cranesbills”. Of course you expect lots of variety in the plant world, just as two beautiful girls are never completely beautiful in exactly the same way. But none of the pictures, admittedly not 422 pictures, looked like what I grew up recognizing as geraniums.
Then I read the following: “Confusingly, "geranium" is also the common name of members of the genus Pelargonium, which are also in the Geraniaceae family and are widely grown as horticultural bedding plants.” Moving to Pelargonium I discovered there are “200 species of perennials, succulents, and shrubs, commonly known as geraniums.” It went on to say, “Confusingly, Geranium is the botanical name (and also common name) of a separate genus of related plants often called cranesbills.”
I’m getting confused.
But down the page a bit is a very nice picture of a pink flowered plant that I would point to if I were trying to explain what a geranium was. It has the title Pelargonium x hortorum (Zonal). And the text to the side reads,
These are known as zonal geraniums because many have zones or patterns in the center of the leaves, this is the contribution of the Pelargonium zonale parent. Common names include storksbill, fish or horseshoe geraniums. They are also referred to as Pelargonium × hortorum Bailey. Zonal pelargoniums are tetraploid, mostly derived from P. inquireans and P. zonale, together with P. scandens and P. frutetorum.I think it fair to say that confusion now predominates.
I have narrowed the picture posted today down to six hundred twenty some possibilities, assuming it is, in fact, a geranium, whether botanical or common, and discovered that the geranium I grew up with is in fact, if I understood correctly, a Zonal Pelargonium. I don’t think I can make it any more clear than that. The rest I leave to you.
As if a million things could spring from a single root, and each one of them ready to bloom. This is an amazing structure of busyness that the average person sees as a clump of texture. Or sees not at all. Something on the side of a parking lot. Something brownish and greenish. I must confess that there is so much happening here that it is difficult to see. What does one focus on? What does one finally comprehend? What does it say exactly? Its purpose is obvious, but its process is supremely mysterious.
Having something to say is not what it’s all about. Rather, finding myself saying something. I see a picture and watch myself say something in relation to it. I see a thought floating in my mind and express it. Longer posts take longer to type. They go in more directions. I see the things and then say them. Nothing is built of paragraphs and sentences, nothing saved and used later. It’s there and on the page, or on the screen, and then done with. Like a stroke of the brush on canvas. One tiny stroke. Does the artist really remember each stroke? And then I walk, and breathe, and think, and eventually I find myself saying something else. It is a process, but not premeditated.
These are the blooms of a New Zealand Flax Plant in the front yard about half through my walk. You could almost miss them on a bright sunny day, but at almost sunset everything looks more dramatic, more imposing. I grew up with flax plants in the yard. They have an irregular blooming pattern, which means they either do or do not bloom, and since lives are full, it’s difficult to remember when they did or did not bloom. I loved the long blades and large clumps, but I don’t remember anything quite so dramatic as these blooms. That’s not the moon, by the way, though it would be even more dramatic if it were, it’s a lens flair, and there’s also a bit of rainbow in the photograph — the sun pushing over the last bit of roof. I tried not to concern the neighbors, but I stood for the longest time looking at this before snapping the picture and moving on. I remembered lying in the grass as a young boy watching the tips of the flax leaves move in the afternoon breeze. Some things last forever.
I like to think that at one time in its long development the entire surface of the earth looked like this. Both the ground and the sky are well beyond our view. No pathways, no sunrise or sunset, just ferocious growth. And then I like to think that something developed, how I have no idea, that ate and ate and ate such things, clearing vast stretches of ground and giving us, or them, sunrise and sunset for the very first time. This is a fantasy based on absolutely nothing but this revealed complexity. We are looking at the interior of a very large jade plant treated though the years with absolute neglect. A dumpster is pushed up against it and removed for a few minutes at weekly intervals. The plant seems merely to have adjusted to that indignity, grown this way and that to find the light and to survive. And survive it did. But with no help from us.
Sometime leading up to Thanksgiving last year I started to write a post based on this photograph. I really liked the photograph, but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I began, “There are two kinds of people, those who stack rocks and those who kick them down.” There’s a triangular piece of dirt with a tree trunk in the middle belonging to St. Timothy’s Catholic Church that one walks past to reach the back entrance of the market. On the majority of my trips I pass that spot. For the longest time I would find a delightful miracle as I turned. Rocks stacked artfully on rocks. But then I noticed that very often the next day there wouldn’t be two rocks standing. The whole design was turned into a jumble of rocks and dirt and disorder. I tried to set some of the designs right, but found that I lacked both the skill and the necessary patience. Then I notice that the rocks went unstacked, and stayed unstacked for several months.
The original post I deleted because it seemed very negative. When I found this photograph earlier this evening I realized that my statement had not been true. I couldn’t stack the rocks, but neither was I capable of kicking them down. The two kinds of people turned out to be a gross exaggeration. There were people who stacked rocks and there were certainly people who kicked them down, but these two groups were the exception to the rule. The groups may have been large, but the more I stared at this photograph, thinking of all the surprises and all the failures, I realized that each group was probably very small.
The person who stacked the rocks either gave up or moved on. The person who kicked them down now leaves his initials scratched into walls or doors, or breaks flowering plants. I think the vast majority of people simply ignored the rocks. It bothered me because I saw the miracle in them, the unlikely beauty. And it’s taken all this time to realize how wrong I was, how wrong I may still be. How do we encourage beauty without condemning ugliness?
One of the few flowers I know with confidence by name. This one was a few feet from my front doorstep when I found it, two or three feet beyond a leaf covered in droplets of water that I posted as Not Rain. When I went back to look two or three days later, it had opened.
Calla Lilies have been associated with the Virgin Mary for at least the last thousand years, and before that with Hera, wife of Zeus, in Greek mythology. They are symbolic of purity, owing to their stunning whiteness. But they are also funerary flowers symbolic of rebirth and resurrection, probably because they are not only beautiful, but extremely tenacious. They return from damage and neglect with an insensible determination.
The lilies in my patio garden were planted by a woman who lived next door from a heap of plants dug up and tossed in the trash. She carried them home, as she was want to do, dug a hole here and there, stuck them in and watered them, for a time at least. Since planting smaller flowers around them and watering them regularly, they have turned into a lush group of plants whose blooms seem endless. To use the epithet “crazy” for this woman would be to undersell her peculiarity. The police suggested that I document everything she said and did and take it to a judge in San Luis Obispo. But before that got very far the lady who owns the building had had enough. She gave her back her deposit with the understanding that if she ever set foot on the property again she would be arrested. It was a very stressful time, and I feel a tinge of regret.
But the lilies she planted are alive and well and absolutely stunning to behold. Anyone who finds himself face to face with one, by which I mean not a photograph or a painting of one, and and finds himself not impressed, has something missing in his very soul. I remember tearing one apart as a small child, tearing the petal, which is actually a leaf, and breaking the yellow spike. I remember holding the dispirit parts in my hands, flower gone, and thinking — this is a very strange memory — I had just done something wrong. Georgia O’Keeffe and Diego Rivera, and others, made it impossible not to think of calla lilies in sexual, spiritual, esthetic, and even ethnic terms. They are a true miracle of the plant world, things that rise from the trash and bad behavior, and make the heavens glow and almost speak.
I took the bus into town today. A slice of mushroom pizza, a peek at new and old books, and a final cup of coffee. What I found will keep me going for a while, but as time goes on, its importance will diminish. In a hundred years none of this will matter. The bricks and stone in this picture were set in place just over one hundred years ago. In these parts that’s a long time. The building is an historical monument. But I remember walking up marble steps in Copenhagen that were bowed in the center from the motion of feet walking up and down, not for a hundred years, but for hundreds and hundreds of years. These bricks and stone were laid in place by a San Luis Obispo contractor who probably had his picture taken next to the final work. I imagine him with a thick mustache and odd looking clothes. But the man or men who laid the steps in Copenhagen may or may not be known even by name. We look through a deep mist of time to form an impression of this event. It wasn’t someone’s grandfather or great-grandfather, but a person in the remote past. A person, yes, but someone with no connection to us. An alien of sorts. We do things and keep doing them, but for short periods of time. In the end, our contribution seems enormous, but in the longer end, it diminishes and fades and finally ceases. The town resisted tearing these buildings down because it hungered for heritage, thirsted for eons of time connecting it to the remote past. But all it got was some old buildings resisting the inevitable.
Just when you think there’s nothing left to see, and the camera is off and in your pocket, the world opens up in telling detail. What art department could come up with such a thing and color it like this? It seems to be hanging from a dead plant, but maybe that’s because I see only part of the process. It’s toward the back entrance of the library. I’m pretty sure it was a plant most people ignored. Except the gardener, of course, who left it where it was. Even now, one would have to stop and look to be surprised. To be amazed. To wonder what was happening and how it was almost missed.
I checked to see if the stem of this flower connected with the roots of the nasturtiums surrounding it. Indeed, this is a nasturtium flower, something I don’t remember seeing before, which is no fault of the nasturtiums. Why there would be a flower at all is what amazes me. This yard was all nasturtiums, then taken down to all dirt, and is now, once again, all nasturtiums. At first they were tiny specs of green, now they are full sized and thriving. Why would they need flowers at all is what I wonder, when they could reach New York by the simple but determined process of duplication. They could simply will themselves to reach New York. When you clear a yard of weeds and the weeds grow back, it’s not an earthshaking event. You clear a vague selection of weeds and another vague selection replaces it. But when you clear a yard of nasturtiums, and in the blink of an eye the yard fills back up with nasturtiums, you know that something is going on that has nothing to do with seeds and everything to do with unchecked manic botanical growth.
Weeds 5
A weed like tuft of grass pushing through a break in the sidewalk and the once red painted curb. Such a common site that it’s difficult to see. Weeds are plants nobody wants, but I doubt anyone at all has given this plant or tuft or weed any notice at all. It’s there and not there. When humans cease to exist, there will be no weeds at all. But something will be growing almost everywhere. Concrete will split, asphalt will crack and turn to powder, but grass and plants of every order will continue. Perhaps future behemoths without humans to worry about will find them delicious.
Two months ago I posted a rather dramatic picture of this plant in Bonsai taken at a corner lot about halfway up the hill on my daily walk. I talked about the owner being “meticulous.” The picture was from last December, but long before that, before I started taking pictures along the way, I watched him trim or prune what I took to be a tree inch by inch, an all day job. I watched him trim one tiny branch. Well, trimming time must have been while I was in the hospital. When I took my first walk I was dumfounded. There’s a house behind the bush or tree or plant. The tree was so tightly trimmed that you could see right through it. It seemed hardly there. I suppose he trimmed it the same way last year, but I’d forgotten the impact it made. And if it was twenty then, that means this is the twenty-first year of trimming it. May the process go on forever.
Weeds 4
Or Sweet Alyssum. It makes a beautiful thick white cover in a garden. The flowers are very small, and a good ground cover produces quite literally millions of them. Alyssum is weedlike, which is why I have included it here. You can buy alyssum as seed or in six packs at the garden supply. Or you can walk around vacant lots and just dig some up. There’s a little bit of alyssum almost everywhere here. This picture is from a small patch in a vacant lot next door.
I remember a small nursery in Torrance that got cut off from the main road by a shopping center. It was actually a house surrounded by a nursery on the corner of a residential area. When they went out of business they just walked away, leaving potted plants that had all died, and large rectangles of flats. This is an old memory, so it’s possible this was before six packs became common the way they are today. I remember my father buying everything in flats and cans for his summer landscaping jobs. And I remember cutting cans and separating out clumps of roots when I planted from the flats. I was only a boy at the time. But most of the flats were also dead in the abandoned nursery. Except flowery white tufts which seemed impervious to neglect.
I was on a long walk at the time and had cut through the residential area to avoid the shopping center. It was a strange sight. No fence. No signs. Just abandonment and neglect. I walked up to the flats overflowing with whiteness and saw something very strange. I saw a cone, with myself at the apex, of white flowering tufts going out in front of me into front yards, side yards, back yards, going out a hundred yards or more to the cinderblock wall of the shopping center. And the ocean breeze was behind me.
Alyssum is a self-propagating plant that propagates in the direction of the wind. Everywhere in this widening cone were clumps of white mixed in with every sort of landscaping. So, it’s both a beautiful plant, and a pernicious weed. Or a beautiful plant and a strangely beautiful weed.
I love it when two flowers come together. These were buried inside a bush about six inches from the surface in poor light. I’m not sure that they were part of the bush itself, but they caught my eye and stopped my feet. There’s something about two flowers as one that really gets me. But I was late for dinner and I snapped the photo and … that’s all there is. That and the memory of them.
Weeds 3
This looks to be something more than a common weed. Struggling for survival in an unkindly place, it clutches to the ground and reaches outward. It would be simple to say merely that it’s programmed to do so. But does one word sum up this activity? Have we reached an understanding if we find a word that says what we seem to feel? It’s like saying that the peddle is what makes the car go. Yes, you push the peddle and the car goes, but you have to push the right peddle at the right time for the right thing to happen. And even so, it’s not the peddle that makes the car go. The peddle is connected to a process that we barely understand. Between push and go is a seemingly infinite series of things linked one to the next that makes something happen. Like clutching and reaching. Having said these words, do we understand the plant? Or have we just tried to move on to something else?
There’s nothing easier than a bunch of pansies in a large pot to add color and freshness. These were near the entrance of McDonald’s, one of the few places within walking distance that isn’t completely tourist oriented. I sometimes have coffee there and — don’t tell my doctor — a small hamburger and fries with no salt. She gets upset when I tell her that. But I can buy three cups of coffee with refills for $3.24, one small for me and two large for homeless friends. Starbucks coffee is prohibitively expensive, costs even more for refills, and is bitter by comparison. So, I end up at McDonald’s more often than I should. I try to explain to the doctor that a small hamburger and a small fries is basically a snack. It holds me over until dinner at home and involves a half-hour walk in each direction. But she has her job and I have mine. I’m waiting to see what will replace the pansies when the weather warms.
Weeds 2
They seem to grow where it seems impossible to grow. And yet, there they are. We wonder if they have the power to push the sidewalk one way and the asphalt another. In a month or so, will something split? Weeds are a sort of reminder that we figure things out only so far, that the nooks and crannies we ignore are real. They exist as a kind of unsuspected opportunity. Something we believe had been eliminated. But there they thrive.
I don’t usually remember what I said about a picture. I see something to be said and say it. When I’m done I say something else. A day or so later I reread what I wrote, make corrections, if necessary — there are almost always corrections — and then either move it to a folder called To Be Posted, or take the time to actually post it. I currently have 65 posted, but waiting to be published, with 21 in the To Be Posted file ready to go. Counting this post, that makes 87 that have yet to be published. Which means that every day through mid-June and every other day through mid-July is presently accounted for. I tell people that if I die tomorrow, they won’t come looking for me until late July, but that’s not entirely true. The landlord will miss me just after the 1st of the month.
I wrote something rather satisfying about this photograph of a spider web a few nights ago. I remember nodding and saying, “What a perfect ending.” But when I moved it to the To Be Posted file, the computer asked me a routine question, or so I thought, that I disregarded, and the file disappeared. It didn’t go somewhere else. It didn't end up in the Trash. It just ceased to exist. So I opened Pages only to realize that I had absolutely no memory of what I had just written. Something about sunlight and random spider webs. It was well written and had a nice ending. I remember that. But that’s all there was. That’s all I remembered between writing and directing the text to a holding file.
So, I leave you with what I remember.
[ I posted this title with the wrong text and photograph on the 17th of last month. Somehow I copied everything from the post published on the 13th. Everything except the title. I have corrected that mistake, but since it was so long ago, I am posting the correction today and will leave it up for a week or so, so everyone has a chance to read it.]
Pushing out over the sidewalk and dead leaves. I’m reminded of a study done more than fifty years ago that monitored eye movement over photographs. One of the more interesting results involved fishnet stockings and specifically men’s eyes. Women responded quite differently. Women seemed to assess the legs, moving up and down the central portion where more of the leg was visible. But men’s eyes went almost immediately to the periphery, the edge where the fishnet pattern started to condense. Men saw the outline of the leg more than the leg itself, and they did this not just a small percentage of the time, but almost the entire time. So, perhaps when I see plants growing over the edge of the sidewalk, I’m seeing with masculine eyes. When we planted the patio a few months ago, I made sure to plant some of the starters close enough to the edge that they would grow over it and onto the patio. In my mind, that would give them something that they otherwise lacked. I didn’t think about it, it was just something I did. But now that I do, I think it is the edge itself which is most visible, where the eye is drawn. At least, where my eye is drawn. Like this leftover bloom on the edge of the sidewalk.
Weeds 1
Everyone knows the difference between weeds and plants. You weed the garden but water the plants. In a very real sense, however, i.e. in a sense not tinged with poetic device or philosophy, there is absolutely no difference between the two. Weeds are simply the plants we don’t want. A rose bush in a field of wheat is a weed. A delightful dandelion in a manicured lawn is a weed. And all those native grasses that turn the hillsides green when it rains and the sun comes out, if they wander down the hill and into the garden, are nothing but weeds. The distinction between plants and weeds is a false dichotomy. You and I are the primary difference between the two.
This is what dialysis looks like. At least one corner of it. There are more than twenty such setups in one spacious room. The machines beep and warn and make other strange noises that drove me absolutely crazy the first two days, until I brought a more interesting book to read. Then it all sort of blended into reading time. There is an overall coordinator on the floor, nurses in blue and nurses aides in white. There is also a dietitian, a social worker, an independent nurse, a peritoneal dialysis nurse, a receptionist, and various doctors who come and go. All of them are extremely good at what they do. This is Carla and her friend Mariel sitting down to the right. They are on loan from Santa Maria, which is a long drive to the south, and if I laughed and giggled as much as they do in the space of one work day, I would be too exhausted to stand up. They make work fun and dialysis interesting. They smile and joke and carry on, and I think how dull the world would be without them.
You can see by the clock that it’s just after 5:15. At 5:30 my buzzer will go off and they will spring to action. It takes almost a half-hour to disconnect me and for me to pack and leave. My bus home is three and a half blocks from just outside the window and it leaves at 6:33. So this is just about the best time of the entire day. I leave with a spring in my step thinking about how horrible I thought this was going to be.
I used to think that the fire department installed fire plugs. I never had any reason to doubt that. But when I started to type something about this plug, it sounded wrong. The fire department doesn’t have a bureaucracy or the equipment to accomplish that task. They obviously use the plugs, but that would seem to be the end of their involvement, unless they recommend where the plugs should go, and test them to make sure they're working. It seems more correct to think that the city or the county has that job. They have people to map out water pipes and equipment and people to install them. So the fresh coat of paint on this plug that got my attention would probably be courtesy of the city more so than the fire department. I really like the fire department here and was just about to compliment them on it. I guess I could call and ask, but this armchair scrutiny has more to do with probability than actuality. If I’m good with it, the problem is solved. But it's a good looking plug, don’t you think?
I found these on part of the church grounds I seldom walk past. They seem to be growing from a kind of grass. It was fascinating to find something so beautiful where nothing had been before. Grass isn’t the most interesting plant in the world. I pass a great deal of grass without paying it the least attention. Maybe they’re just pushing up through the grass. I couldn’t tell. The next time I’m at the nursery I’ll show this picture to them and ask what’s going on. But why would you plant ordinary grass when you could plant something that takes a deep breath and shoots up hundreds of such blooms, if that’s what’s happening? I should have looked more carefully, but I only started to think about it on the way home, and by then there were no answers.
This is a forlorn section of my walk that has started to turn green. When the days lengthen, the sun intensifies and the moisture evaporates, it will return to everyday dirt. But for now its parameters have become ideal for the production of moss, a kind of scum that covers the earth from time to time. It grows on the backside of trees to avoid the sun, which is a way to find north in a crowded forrest, and in shadowy areas under leaves and the shade of walls. It is often associated with decay and forgottenness. But to give it credit, it has turned this dismal patch of ground into something worth stopping to look at. It is a sign that there is always hope.
Most people are only vaguely aware that Easter arrives on different days of the year. They just look at the calendar and work from there. But it really is a very simple and compact formula, though with a long and confusing history. At the Council of Nicea (325), called by Constantine I, it was decided that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday on or after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox, though it wasn't stated in exactly that way. The vernal equinox is the first day of spring when the day and the night are of equal length. It is midway between the longest and shortest days of summer and winter, and opposite the autumnal equinox. The Council of Nicea tried to coordinate the solar and lunar calendars for this holiday. This year the equinox came on the 20th of March. Saturday the 31st was the full moon, so Sunday (today) is Easter Sunday. You don’t have to remember any of this, but sometimes it’s just nice to know how things work.
It may or may not be appropriate that today is also April Fools’ Day. But there is a long tradition of teaching fools that is more esoteric than exoteric. Michael Frost, an Australian “missiologist”, has published what looks to be a wonderful read: Jesus the Fool: The Mission of the Unconventional Christ.
What do I mean by saying Jesus was a fool? There are two levels of meaning. The first is that by this world’s standards of success, prestige, and influence, Jesus can be considered a failure, a misguided (though commendable) fool. The second level is the more provocative. It suggests that Jesus actually played the fool in order to enhance his ministry. I think both are true.It seems a lot more promising than most of the April Fools’ jokes one is likely to encounter. I’ve only read as much as you have, but I think I like it.