Time well spent With Dragonfruit

I grew up beneath a towering Cottonwood tree.

I told it secrets frequently. I spoke my dreams into its bark; pieces of a younger me bound up in it. When it was struck by lightning and had to be cut down, I wept by its downed corpse. The Giving Tree was a book I had lived firsthand. 

Where its decapitated stump sat, a little patch of mutant clovers grew. Some four leaved, some fives. I wasn't sure what it meant, but I tended to those clovers like my life depended on it. 

My life still does.

Without time in nature I quickly wilt.

Nature and its cyclicity is something I became aware of from a very young age, as I spent most of my time out in it with my siblings. Growing up poor and miles from the nearest real town meant lots of time self entertaining on the 2 acres of land my parents lived on, surrounded by an expanse of corn and wheat and beans that bled into the horizon.

I don't know if those mutant clovers were a normal thing--or if I really had given that tree so much of myself--that it decided to fertilize the soil just enough to give me a little bit of luck back.

All I know is, that if we pay attention close enough, miraculous things will go unnoticed.

 

I've been spending time in Florida the last few weeks with family and the warm weather and laughter is the much needed reprieve from the harshness of Northern winters. Not to mention a series of health emergencies I had between November  and January. Being evacuated to the hospital on a day when it was -32 degrees with drifts 3 feet tall, and 2 ambulances and a firetruck getting stuck en-route to rescue me, was definitely not on my 2023 bingo card.

I've reflected on those calamities, and I've realized that I had gave far too much of myself and my health to others. If we don't tend to our own needs, no one else will. We are cyclic, just like nature, and if we forget to give ourselves a proper watering and a good dose of nutrients we may die a little too soon.

 I've been spending early mornings outside here in Florida before the heat arrives and found myself in the presence of giant white blooming flowers busy with bees. I spent my morning studying these flowers and listening to the buzz of determined honeybees flitting from one flower to another. By the time the sun was closer to noon, the bees were gone and so were the flowers.

 

 They only bloomed for moments in the morning--vibrancy is a necessary impermanence. Beauty, while fleeting, is needed in nature. Blossoms do not look the same to us at they do to pollinators, and there are features on flowers that are only available to extrasensory organs of bees. I wonder, what is the experience of flowers like to a bee? What sort of euphoria do they get to experience as they transfer pollen from one stamen to another pistil?