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Gail Wilson Kenna

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I use this cliché, despite an echo from poet T.S. Eliot, who said a cliché begins as heartfelt and then loses its heart. Yes, linguistic death through repetition, words spoken from habit, little thought behind them. Yet this photo speaks to my worried and weary heart.

                                                    


Impatiens, a colorful shade lover, meant for well-draining, nutrient-rich soil. So…what was it doing between rock turned to gravel and the hard cement lip of a three-bay garage? I noticed this plucky Impatiens the same day I stopped on the path to the cottage and looked at a spider web: one audaciously connected from a wind-blowing Pampas to a Knock-Out Rose. The web is gone now. But this inspiring flower, despite my mate accidently dragging a hose across it, survives with a few pink pedals. I’ve given the flower water (no rain lately) and weeks ago, the day I first noticed it, I moved the wheelbarrow in the garage to give my tiny Miata more space. Which has kept me from driving over this ardent survivor.

From an insignificant beginning in one tiny, black-plastic container, countless Impatiens have returned each spring, spreading throughout our garden, especially in front of the cottage by the garage. This survivor, all by itself, was the first to speak to me about a rock and a hard place. And this cliché speaks for both Aging and technological Future Shock in my life.

Today, the “survivor” sent me to my library for Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower.


This collection of essays and poems from his many books & notebooks is one Eiseley compiled before his death in 1977.  I recalled that one of the book’s essays is, “How Flowers Changed the World.” But I had forgotten that the late W.H. Auden, a famous British poet, wrote the introduction to The Star Thrower.


A lovely conjunction, as earlier I’d thought of a line from Auden’s poem, “One Evening.” Two lines from it have haunted me since junior year in college.

 “And the crack in the teacup opens? A lane to the land of the dead.”

The words speak loudly to me in our fraught political times. And with the election in two days, to lessen my fear of an anti-democratic outcome, I will quote words from Eiseley’s essay on flowers.

“A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time in the history of our four-billion-year-old planet, flowers were not to be found anywhere on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator, one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life possessed no other color.


Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion, nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms—the flowering plants.

Image of the First Flower

Even the great evolutionist Charles Darwin called them “an abominable mystery,” because they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast.


Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know—even man himself—would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star Intuitively, he had sensed like a naturalist, the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man. (Please note the cheek of AI to keep trying to change Eiseley’s prose.)


Next week: A poem by Loren Eiseley, “Winter Sign,” that links in my mind, both spider  from an earlier posting and  Impatiens from this week. 

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Noffsingerart
Nov 04

A really lovely post, Gail! Thank you.

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