Recently, at the start of a busy day, I went out to the back garden. Marilyn had asked me to take a photo of the zinnias she had planted from seed.
"They are taller than I am!" she had said.
I wandered in the backyard, watching butterflies among the zinnias, then strolling to the cannas by the peace pole. These tall, red, blooms came from our friend Jen's garden. In the same bed is a sedum from a neighbor and a hydrangea that was a gift in memory of Marilyn's brother Mo.
After a few minutes, I went back in the house and began an eleven-hour day of helping students with papers, attending meetings, preparing a workshop, and planning classes for the next day.
All through the day, though, my mind would rest now and then on a monarch butterfly alighting on a zinnia, the sun on the flowers, the green of the grass.
These images were gifts, arriving unexpectedly now and then and refreshing me--making me think of a poem I memorized in the sixth grade, back in India: William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," his meditation on daffodils. The poem ends,
I gazed—and gazed—but little thoughtWhat wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The stroll in the garden reminded me that being outside and being really present for even a few minutes in the morning could provide a respite from busyness later in the day, the memory of those moments quietly and unexpectedly bringing beauty.
