All That's Cracked Up to Be

Spring has sprung. Crazy color has burst all over. Explosive hot pink rhododendron, waving yellow iris, ice blue Johnny jump-ups that seem to shout "surprise!" Plants are rioting in the staidest city neighborhoods, their festive red, white and purple hues springing like geysers behind tended fences or meticulous stone walls. They're crazily painting the town. Party time. We're here!

What a joyful fling is their spring! What a bright show of manicured wealth and health in the tended part of town, where every flower is carefully controlled like the manufactured poise of debutantes. It's so rich. But yellow flowers are popping through the cracks at makeshift parking lots, around the edges of abandoned factories. And that affluent white alyssium under all those landscaped hedges somehow escaped to burst like fireworks from a seedy curb.

And I am thinking: look at that. What flaring flair! They're blooming their fool heads off-- as though this rundown corner were a palace. No difference do they see. Nor do they know they look here like weeds, untended and unloved. They're just being fully alive while they can be. Vive la difference to me. These vivacious flowers know I need their cheer right here and now at this red light. Thank you.

And I am thinking: look at that. Transcendence. They're glad to be here too, and not just in the richer part of town. They're as bright and melodic as the ones ten blocks back in those expensively elegant gardens. No petal of difference in their performing art. How bravely they shove upward to bloom through these forgotten concrete cracks. What joy to not care a whit where they are or who should pass by or cast an eye or render an opinion. Look at that. They are just there abloom with utter happiness, whatever, so what and all that jazz. Just the way the Buddha says the sun shines on everyone everywhere without conditions. And we should ourselves be wherever we are with whoever may be there as readily cheerful and magnificently unselfconscious as all that.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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