Fading Sunset

Sitting on the lake, I watched the sun set behind the great Kentucky hills. The sheer beauty of it always draws my thoughts to just how quickly the most precious and perfect things in life fade away from us.

I didn't have time to grab my camera - it was simply gone too quickly. Isn't that just how it goes? At that one moment our lives are settled and things seem to be going our way, it all fades from existence. Gone. Forever denied and quickly - oh, so too quickly - forgotten. How is it, then, that we allow ourselves to hold on so tightly to those things that simply cannot last? Why do we want those quickly lost moments to last forever?

My best friend says maybe life is about that one second of beauty - like the short time a butterfly's perfectly colorful wing is witnessable before he files again from the flower. But, I do not accept that. I want more than one second of life's beauty. I want a full life of it. I want to hold on to that setting sun before it sinks behind the hills of Kentucky for longer that it's meant to be held, I suppose. But, I cannot bring myself to accept any less than that.

Faithful Gardener

There she is, standing for hours; pruning a single fern that no one else will notice. Just standing and picking, picking and perfecting, for hours on that one little flower, that one little aspect of her lawn that no one else even seems to notice. In fact, when the watchful observer spots her on the way to meet friends for dinner and sees her again working tirelessly on that same spot upon returning, nothing is noticeably different. All seems as it was before. Yet, for the faithful gardener a state of perfection is finally reached and she may retire yet again to her home. Hours of work, hours of her life that is to the observer wasted, has ended in sweet success to the gardener.

But, still…hours...? On a single fern...? On any single plant…? Really…? Is that necessary!?

And then I’m reminded how much of our lives are spent gardening our own single ferns. Those little things we place so much importance on that no one else even seems to notice. Sometimes it’s a physical attribute, sometimes it’s academia, sometimes it’s relationships with our family or friends, sometimes it’s one thing at which we failed or that one success. We stand and prune and pick away to perfect that one little thing. Do we ignore bigger things in the process? Do we forget to focus on our whole existence? Too busily slaving away for sweet success in something that doesn’t matter? Or, is that one sweet success what it’s all about?

Sunflowers and Doves

Driving home from Holiday World with my best friend beside me and my children almost to sleep in the back, I pointed to the beautiful sunflower field out the right window. The sea of yellow stretched through the otherwise barren and weed-laden field and my first thoughts were of the symbolism therein: something tall and beautiful in an unkempt field, which (in my mind) translated to hope and love in otherwise dashed dreams, which made me think of mistakes (weeds) both heart wrenching yet somehow beautiful, which led to…

“Hey, Leslie. You know why that sunflower field’s there? See, people plant those fields to attract doves and then that’s where they hunt. The flowers attract the doves and – bam!”

How sad. All that beauty to attract the innocent and to make the kill. Isn’t that how it is, though? We like to think things are beautiful just to be beautiful; that real and simple peace exists. But, then, we’re slapped in the face with the cruel reality that beauty (whether people, situations, events, objects, etc.) often only attract so as to kill. I wonder, how often are we the dove? And, how often are we the sea of yellow sunflowers?