This sprouting Pink purslane (Portulaca pilosa) has made its home at the edges of the sacred Hammock growing here on our campus. This place is full of life and persistence. A summer of rainfall after the long draught brought up seeds that had waited a seeming eternity for the life spark, for the holy water to switch their processes on and send roots into the well-drained soil and send cells skyward. The Portulaca loves the climate. It's succulent leaves grow fat wet cells that cherish the rain waters and hold them close even when the summer fades to fall and rainstorms come less frequently if at all. It's iron rich fiber is a tribute to its strength, delicate yet sturdy, delicious on a summer salad and delightful to observe. This sprout may be a few weeks old, if that. They branch and spread at their base as they grow, sprouting shining flowers, purple and eye-catching, tempting us to remember that life does not care if the landscape is comprised of but a heap of sand or the rich loam of the prairie, where seeds drop and rains fall and sun shines, life can be found. Where energy enough to set the cells in motion has been established, something lives. This flower will go to seed next week or the week after that and store the same knowledge and hope and it will drift outward away from the base and wait for another summer's season to roll through. The floor of the Hammock is covered with these plants. Annual ground herbs, first stage succession, the promise of life and the beginning of a long cycle of change that will one day have this earth say Oak and Palm, where it merely says purslane and crabgrass now. The plant is nothing without the ground in which to root its fibers, and nothing without the rain with which to fill its cells, and nothing without the sun with which to energize it growth, but with all of these it is its own statement and presence and beauty. A beauty that has come to have some call this species "Kiss me quick" to which my eyes have always abided. So much history in a single stalk. Eternity in a bloom.More knowledge here than in all the planners in Washington. More foresight and trial and error. We would serve oursleves well to notice the foolish ways in which our own extracted consciousness has ridden itself into a dilemma. Power has come to stand in for intelligence, force for right, ignorance for truth. Thoreau once wrote that "just as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up." The lulls have been long and yawning. Whether change or not will come is not a question that the polls will answer. Only you.
