On, In and Around Mondays: Focusing on the Wild

Every year, this lawn gets wilder. 

I have been letting it happen, even making it happen by spreading dandelion seeds to the wind, by refusing to mow the leopard-faced flowers that look something like violets but smaller and more elongated. This morning, I was greeted by more buttercups, more purple spike flowers, more wild mustard than I was last year in May.

I love this wildness, this lack of landscaping focus—in a county that prizes the pristine, the trimmed, the perfectly edged.

Suddenly, the thought rises in me—a thought I've been toying with in conversations and private musings for the past few weeks. I'm unfocused. Like my wild lawn. I am never going to win the prize for the best rose garden, the biggest and reddest tomatoes, the greenest dandelion-free grass. I am also never going to win the prize for being a national speaker, a top-selling author. I can't stand the focus it requires. 

One of the conversations I had, concerning this matter, was with a visionary photographer friend. She is far more than a photographer, dipping her hands into business and investments, and all manner of networking and people-building. I told her I really couldn't see her focusing on one aspect of photography and trying to make a name for herself that way. I asked, "Can you really picture yourself on a 5,000-ways-to-photograph-a-biscuit track?"

I also told her that this is a particular kind of gift, this wildness in her spirit, this vision she has to keep thinking up the next thing and then moving on.

I'm thinking this is me too. I can focus. I can focus on my wild ways. Spreading seed, cultivating the purple in life, building the raucous creativity of color in people and systems. I can let this happen, yes. I can even make it happen.

_______

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)



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This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Loving Monday: Blueprints?

"God has a plan for your life."

Does he?

Let me digress. Once, a long time ago, I saw a piece of art that consisted of lightweight cloth and a wind source. I stood there watching it and thinking about Creation. I thought about the sky and how it was always the sky, as God planned. But it changed day by day. I thought about the trees and how they were always the trees, but the wind changed their shape in unpredictable fashion. Water is water, but its flow alters and splashes. The color of day makes a stream silver, then green or amber.

What does this mean for us as people? Are we basically people, free to change with times and seasons? Flexible, responsive, able to decide we don't want to stick with our story? Or are we, in simpler blueprint fashion, called and gifted for a particular path? Are we supposed to be following some kind of "plan for our lives"? Beckett's Loving Monday begins to suggest that, though I'm not sure how far Beckett himself would push the idea if questioned.

The idea of calling and gifting can give us direction in life. That seems good. Some people in history and the bible appear to fit into this model. But the idea of calling and gifting can also hold us back, "I don't feel called." Well, so? Maybe it is enough that you are a tree and today the wind is blowing East and you would delight to bend with it.


Sara Makes a Snow Path, photo by L.L. Barkat.

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