Flowers and Feet

There is no shortage of sadness in the world. Sunday March 6th was the 57th anniversary of the Civil Rights March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. In 1965 police brutally attacked people asking for voting rights. Today, March 8, 2022 news reports say over 2 million refugees have fled Ukraine for safety.

There is no shortage of goodness in the world. In Selma in 1965 Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel remarked as though he felt “his feet were praying” as he crossed the bridge. On Suday March 6th two civilian volunteers of the Ukrainian Defense Forces got married at a checkpoint outside of Kyiv.

Sometimes the complexity of the world requires a tool kit more complex than prayers and love. When complexity is required, life will most certainly also need your feet. Flowers help too.

“My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - 
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.”

Mary Oliver, My Work is Loving the World