Restoring

We have so many orioles this year. They’re more orange than the oranges we use to attract them. With them come the cat birds and hummingbirds, wood peckers, finch. The bluebirds are fighting with sparrows for the nesting boxes and they’re finally winning. The chirping and trilling and warbling are just riotous. My gardens are exuberant too, with lots of new purple this week. Allium, iris, perennial geraniums. The old fashioned purple iris smell like grape koolaid. Go ahead. Take a sniff. Your nose will be yellow/orange with pollen - totally worth it. This happens every year. Nazis be damned.

There’s comfort in the idea that the Korean lilac will bloom soon and make every room in our house smell gorgeous. All of it will happen whether I notice or not. So, I notice. It’s almost a sacred duty to do so, for the ones who cannot and in defiance of the ones who would take or ruin it. This is bigger than pain or politics. By comparison, it’s trivial that the German American Bund rose and fell almost 100 years ago and here they go, trying again. They will fail once again, and the birds will keep singing.

We matter far less than we think we do. The carpenter bees working on the old picnic table out back do much more for the world. The evil hoarders of resources and joy come, are judged to be vastly wanting, and they go. They leave a smear of shame, a scorched smell of greasy hate, but little more.

I will bear witness to the sordid shame of the ugly souls trying to “rule” over all this. It’s remarkable. Like a bad car wreck, I can’t look away. The needless damage is vile. So let’s tend and defend the vulnerable people and places and restore every day by celebrating and savoring the simple abundance that they can’t even see. Being present in your life to soak in the awe is true defiance. They will not prevail.