Back to the Garden

Woodstock certainly wasn’t a garden, it was a mud bath, acid trip, furious and constant brilliant music.  It was a marker in a decade of children that defied the bombs promised during the Cold War and knew that putting our heads beneath our knees in the basement of the old Catholic school would not save us.  We never believed the stories, the blood mixed with flowers on the campus lawn broke all those facades.

Today the meditative walk revealed tiny chartreuse leaves unfurling from tired long wooden branches, dried from a hot summer.  The old dog reminds me that there is always something worth sniffing.

What if this world and this life was a great adventure rather than a struggle or a lesson or a punishment?  What if this was a fabulous reward?  What if death and fury were a comma rather than a period or new paragraph.  Even if it is a new topic, how can I be excited rather than anxious?

Church bells in the distant and tiny sparrow chirping defy the heaviness of constant breathing and the pull of gravity worrying of the next right action.  Low gray cool clouds cover the horizon–no mountains, no city, no far away path.  Just a walk in the park.  Even when the invisible jet tears a scream through the sky, it holds no wounds.