Fall Flowers

For a variety of reasons, the Fall usually finds me even more reflective than usual. Perhaps it’s some deeply embedded survival instinct triggered by the approach of more challenging weather, it’s the season surrounding the time of the birth of my first daughter or maybe what it always meant to me professionally. Who knows?

Anyway, during my wanderings in the woods today I found myself marveling

at the way the flowers we know as New England Aster and Goldenrod are now blooming together, side by side. These little miracles tend to be overlooked due to some of the other, larger more showy aspects of the season. But there they are. Anyone who has taken any introductory art class could tell you they are perfectly complimentary colours. Clumps of purple and yellow doing what they have been doing for millennia for reasons so deeply rooted in the workings of the world they will never be revealed to me. Sure I can offer all kinds of scientific ideas that in themselves would be discounting the true depths of this amazing phenomenon. I stand and regard them with a Beginner’s Mind endeavouring to forget that which may limit my ability to be truly amazed with my whole being. Nor can I be so arrogant to believe this display is for my benefit. No, I stand here a member of the only species whose extinction would be a benefit to the planet. That dubious distinction requires humility, not arrogance.

All I can offer is my full attention and deep gratitude to bearing witness to the sublime beauty of another miracle that continues to occur in spite of my presence.

Go ahead, get outside and find yourself a miracle.