appreciating a world-view

 

let's get cereus

I have long felt a gulf

between the world I can readily know

and what is really out there,

particularly as to the reality other people live,

time moves on,

and I suddenly realize

that another I care about

is dealing with scary realities,

suddenly I wake up,

no longer cocooned in the protective layers

my own life weaves around me,

I feel the other's world, just for a bit,

but enough to activate the love within me,

I feel the tragedy coming at them,

and I fear how alone it might feel for them,

I make the effort to jump into their world,

and I am with them, a bit,

and I care for them, a lot,

today, I read a Facebook entry from a friend,

the actions he described, the words he used,

challenged me to understand, to realize,

the incredible loving effort he gives to every day,

to his business, to people he knows and cares about,

to plants he can nurture for years,

to asserting hope and beauty in a world

often driven to despair through others' malevolence,

he perseveres despite how our world can seem to not care,

he described his years-long effort to get a night-blooming flower, cereus,

to manifest here, hundreds of miles north of where

he and his mother savored it years ago,

it bloomed the other night, and was gone by morning,

yet this bud, unlike so many before,

endured and opened into its transient glory,

what he wrote about it all was wrenchingly powerful,

expressing what all of us who believe in a better tomorrow

should learn, should realize, about faith and effort,

that if we work toward wholeness, toward rightness, toward beauty, 

however fleeting its manifestation,

we help to show the universe

that each of our lives is worth the investment.

Randy's cereus picture

by Henry H. Walker

September 14, ‘26