Sunday, the backward look…

Yesterday was delightful.  On a Sunday, we give ourselves permission to reflect, to consider in the course of a walk in late summer, the perfection of Nature’s effulgence in plant life.  After breakfast in Geneva we walked down 3rd Street.   We admired the elephant’s ear leaves, purple, green and gray, majestic — rising like a god from the center of a planter.  The globe amaranth blossoms were adjacent to the walkway, like magenta moons orbiting a green earth, suspended in fluid air.  Later in the day, while in Batavia I lingered by the beds of zinnias nearby to the town hall.

The bees were busy, collecting pollen from the late summer abundant blossoms.  I have no idea what it must be like as a bee.  What is their viewpoint as they fly effortlessly from zinnia to zinnia?  What causes the selection of a flower head over others to alight in search of desired pollen?  Does the bee calculate, as do we humans, or is a bee-life pure reflex, action triggered, automatic?  I will never know.  It is good to have a limit to knowledge.  There’s always a limit.  When and where knowledge ends, — delight, appreciation begins.

One final comment about Sunday.  By chance I happened upon the broadcast of the Sunday mass by the Cardinal.  The visual, and the words of ritual seemed hollow, desiccated, dissonant, absurd, — a moribund soporific… 

That is, by comparison to contemplation, admiring a bee making its way among the zinnias…     

Surely there is a tune suitable to this splendor.  There is!  John Lennon’s Imagine performed by Pentatonix.