Powder Puff
I thought this was a Wild Tantan (Desmanthus virgatus), but it turns out to be Sunshine Mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa). Also known as powder puff mimosa. It has been quietly extending its fleshy stem from edge places toward open space within this xeriscape here on the sandy ground of Gulf coast Florida. It grows here like elsewhere in Florida from an abundance of seed stock left by its own past generations. Slowly, unadorned, without fanfare, it creeps, pressing out a compound pinnate leaf of the most intricate and delicate character, and then pressing out another. So unassuming, in fact, that I had barely noticed it except to notice that it grew in every spare corner and had a familiar appearance. It looks very much like the Prairie Mimosa (Desmanthus illinoensis), which is found in the central prairie of the United States and welcome as a highly nutritious grazing plant. But this plant has similar leaves only; it grows in a very different manner creeping along the ground and it explodes a purplish, instead of a white, rounded powderpuff flower. It will leave behind traces of the summer's energy for future residents and future years. This flower shocked me this morning in my daily rounds. It had appeared overnight, a firework explosion of thin petals, a strange purplish presence jumping out at me from the otherwise drab yard. I thought it was a plastic object, at first, and then I thought it had fallen off a plant from the next yard. When I reached to pick it up, I found it connected to the plant where it lay. I noticed then that the mimosa had sprouted multiple pods that would become flowers in the next few days and I realized that the rains that had picked up this week, as against two weeks without rain, had set these patient plants in motion. There is ample sun energy in these parts, whose expression is only hampered by the availability of water.

When does the question of present horror get honestly asked? Murder and death and brutality beyond the scope of our predecessor's best hopes. We are too old for this, as someone should say. We are no longer children. Looking into the face of death produced by 20th century society did not have to be and does not have to become more cycles of the same tired hatreds. We must live more now. More today. More at the ends of our fingers and hands, more within the scope of our visions and range of our ears. We must live life for life and side step the fake ideology of modernist preening and machified communications. These are not idle days of ours, they will be gone one day and our children and our children's children will look back and have the question of where we were. I do not want to be ashamed of the answers they find. May our lives be more and more like the delicate structure produced by this tenacious and delicate ground cover, appealing to the eye (and too the inner eye as well) and exploding, on occassion, with the surprising delight of this flower.