The pepper grass (Lepidium latifolium) exploded like a green bush firework after the heavy rains that fell in early April. The plants is known as poor man's pepper for its mustard garlic tasting seeds and is said to be high in vitamin C. It is a member of the mustard family, but because of reasons lost to history, this one and its common species grows as a weed in disturbed landscapes and empty lots. Reports of its presence are found from Virginia to Florida and west to the Colorado Rockies. It can be eaten by people, but mostly isn't. Instead it propogates itself with the help of wildlife and winds, and its own strategy of producing a sunburst of seeds. This one caught the morning light in the Palm Hammock as I made my rounds one morning last week. Something about the multiple layers of leaves and flowers growing up out of the multitude of stems gave it a wonderful, light, and attractive appearance. I could not take my eyes from it and I pondered the pure beauty that it presented. These plants have grown early in the season down here on this heap of sand called Florida, this is but one of perhaps several hundred that dot the Palm Hammock right now, having begun their life during the rains of January and persistently grown on through a long draught. The pepper grasses I remember from last season, which no doubt parented this one here and the many others, were not so full and robust, but presented themselves in a taller thinner form. This one tickled my imagination, did it look like thought as it bursts in the mind? Can nature offer anything but delight? Does it remind me of the complexity of what one might call engineering lurking in the cells of every living thing, the history of persistence and tenacity, the dogged pursuit of living that spawned our own kind? Can one embrace a form with one's eyes? Can a form speak to us? This pepper grass in its spark of life gave my morning a completeness that the grandest cathedral in the world would not have achieved. We must notice these moments. Relish them. Cultivate.How much nature and living and life was lost on the poor angry soul who took so many lives in Virginia last week. I watched with the same horror as everyone as the numbers rolled in and the facts came pouring out over every web site and news cast, the buzz began to tumble over itself like a verbal avalanche and before long it was no longer about what it was about, but about itself only and people nowhere near the events and no sense of history. I watched as television news became more concerned with its own navel and I watched American culture as its sick discompassion pretended to care, and cared not a whit. A culture without true humanity can make no sense of human frailty. Death and a massacre become cause for fake compassion, false love, pretend concern, all of which is just an expression of the true emotional confusion that comprises our collective existence. Those poor children and professors. Yes. And I wish help and healing and some means to make sense of the losses to the families. But I am ashamed at the official response. I am ashamed that it makes the authorities decide their mistake was not enough policing, not enough threats of violence. They police just fine, thank you. Too much, one might say. Violence is the only answer, so then why would a lost soul not turn to what his own authorities propose? A little more health care, a little more compassion, and a true sensitivity to the rhythms and needs of human culture is what could have avoided this tragedy. This was not one lost soul, unexplainable but as an anomaly, this was us, and our lives and our lifestyles and our selfishness and our callousness and our desire for riches and competition and lust for material coming home to roost. When all you can see are potential advantages, you take advantage. More sensitive souls are destroyed in the process. He said as much. You have destroyed me. He was not lying and even after his desperate act trying to show us something we should have seen without so much carnage, nary a person could listen; an ironic question mark at the end of a bad day, proving, in the end, that his futile desperation was well cultivated. We are not living the joyous existence made possible by the fact of living here on this planet; we are barbarians, not the murderous boy, but the culture who made him. The symptoms are everywhere, and yet we remain deaf and blind and insensitive to them. I wish for an end to these obstacles. May a new worldview explode in our imaginations, growing like the branches of a pepper grass plant after an April rain, catching the morning light, beginning your day on a true path, and aiming toward delight.
