A splash of red caught my eye. As I moved to investigate, I tried to recall whether the museum had displayed any bright red rattlesnakes.
Shielded under a low-hanging cluster of juniper branches and nearly hidden in tall grass, a flower about a foot high bore a single stunning cylindrical bloom with a color between fire and blood. The triangular petals were shaped like a lotus, but folded like a Grecian urn. Against the dark green of the juniper and the scorched greyish tan of the earth, the red beacon flared in the sunlight.
Delighted to find the bloom hidden in brush hidden in juniper hidden in Nowhere, I took a photo so I would remember. Now I’ve forgotten the photo, but the memory is clear. I don’t know the name of the flower. Yet, if I knew the name, would the flower would remain so clear in my memory?
I kept thinking of the line from Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (as quoted in Bull Durham, my favorite baseball movie, also starring Kevin Costner):
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Emerson, in his poem The Rhodora, offers a similar if slightly more encouraging message:
“Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.”
In the oval heart of the grove, crisp juniper breath wiped the sweat from my brow. Surrounded in cool green, red beacon blazing, I sat in lotus position and admired the desert flower and inhaled the chill juniper air and imagined poetry and deserts and flowers and baseball until I stood, collected the sweetness, and walked up the trail.
It was just as many steps up as it was down.
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