I see in this park, a subspecies of reality, forms of life, death, and beauty.
I see beautiful people. Faces, bodies, all symmetry. I see friends, walking together, couples playing with children, two people playing bocce-ball, a family chatting and walking and planning.
I see the ungainly. I see people we call handicapped. The ones that remind us by their exteriors that our interiors are rarely symmetrical. It was M. Muggeridge who called them heavenly messengers.
I see a wedding group posing for pictures on concrete stairs bordered by petunias in front of something called a centennial flame.
I see an old man, wearing a once fashionable straw hat leaning into evergreen shrubs taking note of his own anomie. It may be that his entrance into the cold desolation of solitude is a life-line. It may be his precondition to hope.
I see the work of a gardener challenged. I see decrease, no longer imperceptible change, change wholesale–in the leaves of the Elm.
I see us all, knowingly or not, facing immense uncertainty, all standing on the threshold of emptiness, hoping only to propel some part of a well lived moment into the future.
I see beauty in a landing magpie.
I see every rainbow colour in the flared tail feathers and pinions of a landing magpie.
