Adaptability
This spurge whose delicate flowers erupt in tiny floresence from the stem of the parallel leaves covers ground where ground needs covering.  It is named in a dismissive manner because most would rather dismiss it.  But up close it is quite a sight to behold.  This one is spitting out flowerettes almost faster than I can photograph them.  It doesn't have the purple coloration that other varieties in the region have.  It covers abandoned lawns, a single shoot putting out a large radial plant.  It fits where there is space.  This is a rule of nature.  

We are are more conscious (or at least try to pretend to be) over here in civilization.  The conscious effort of so much rational thought.  Organized, somehow.  It is not the rules of nature over here.  These are different rules.  We like to naturalize them, but they are different.  We have the opportunity to reflect.  We think.  There is a world of difference between the following of impulses and the deliberative approach.  We presume a deliberation.  We like to think so.  That somewhere, someone is paying attention, enough attention.  We like to think so.  We reflect upon ourselves sometimes -- perhaps from faulty premises, but the effort ought to be appreciated -- and consider and deliberate.  This spurge seized the day in the mottled jungle of tropical coastal plants, it will live on.

The Something

There are so many plants living in the Palm Hammock that some of them have escaped my view. And then, one day, I happen upon a gem, a rare, unknown beauty. Many, like this one, are small flowering annuals that can live on into several seasons because of the region's mild climate. This plant does not appear in my identification manual. Nor am I enough of a botanist to track it down in a technical key. But it is a beautiful specimen. Its leaves are long and narrow, unusually sturdy for an annual species of plant. They curl up ever so slightly along their length. Five, as you see, accompany each florescence, the florescence each comprised of tiny bursts of nearly petal-less flowers with small straight pistil and stamen. The plant itself is rigid and almost awkward in form. Long stretches of stalk, insect-leg joints with a fan of almost lance-like leaves and these delightful bursts of symmetrical reproductive tissue. It needs a name. It has already evoked a meaning.

And so this anonymous plant, and so many like it, live on in that cherished plat of land saved there on the west side of campus. Its flowers will erupt for the next several weeks, rains feeding its patient roots. The same weeks in which the national charade unfolds again. Will world-changing tectonic events follow in the wake of a Democratic victory in November? Yes, and no. It will calm what have been very muddied waters and sooth what have been irritated wounds and it will return the reigns of power to the hands of people who use fact-based reasoning to make their cases. But the real changes will have to come from within, or below, or around. There are immanent reconsiderations and re-visionings waiting to be performed. You and I must do that. Here, where we live. Like this unnamed something that holds itself anonymously beautiful and decorates my restoration project on the sand heap at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, we might all find some renewed obligation to produce beauty just because.

Dogs and Sedges

This plot of land, filled with dog fennel and sedge, sprouting live oak and buttonwood, blooming gaillarda and beach sunflower. This plot of land, worked by the hands of dozens in this community, rag tag as it is. These cabbage palms, the Ludwigia (Ludwigia leptocarpa) growing new leaves out of the top of seemingly dead last year's stalk, capeweed and ground cherry, vines and grasses. This verdant land.

Eucalyptus towering in the background, the anomalous exotic, planted by some other idea before the final plans for the school took shape. These trees that have drawn the most attention this past year, housing three settlements under their branches, notched tree limbs and ridiculous rope contraptions.

This palm hammock, where coyote and marsh rabbit roam, where hand to hand labor exhumes the twisted bodies of root mass and tangled strands of root that gave life to the carpet brush created by Brazilian pepper plants. Where clearings like this one appear where they were theorized not to have a chance.

Theories.

The cause

Gaillardia. Perhaps the most showy of Florida native flowers. These delightful draught tolerant flowers are known locally as 'blanket flowers.' They fill up your flower bed like a thick winter blanket. Their leaves are almost succulent. White hairs seem to reflect the sun's heat. Their very appearance is suggestive of the sun itself. A sunburst.
Gaillardia pulchella, blanket flower, frequenter of sandy spots in the vicinity of the coast. This one erupted on the sandy plain of my restoration project. It got there with my help; I tossed seeds out all fall. But it grew of its own volition, and survives of its own will. There are some who reject this
absence of purity, the hand of man, the hand of me. But when you see these colors, blooming amidst browning sedge seeds and bright green dog fennel, you cannot help but feel a small pang of joy. They seem to float above the succeeding annuals and they seem they want to stay. It hasn't rained here for two months. We need the water from the skies because we have no real soils and our top layer is porous sand. We have drained for two years. Draught. And still these flowers bloom and cover the ground in a thick blanket of leafy, stalky, plant cells. Cooling the ground, drawing water from the most remote and unlikely of earth material. The presence of adaptation. Some things, they say,
stay incessantly the same, while others shift and adjust. Which parts work together how? What ways of seeing are respected and considered? We try to integrate our own best thoughts into something altogether stylish. We wish, sometimes, that things had been easier. All of our efforts seem shamefully short sighted. But when we pause, as I think some of us have paused, when we wait for that moment and rather than force, persuasion. We find something profoundly our own, or somehow deeply everyone's. We realize that we all want to shine, each in our own way. And shine we shall. Bright orange pedal dreams, yellow tipped fantasies, alive in the air where no living thing was given much hope.
Flourishing, where only dreams had reigned.

To talk, anymore, is the worst of fates. Talking has nothing but traps. To hope for a better day, to want to inspire, seems to attract the most loathing of spite. And, yet, talk we must, and hope we do. Another season in the sacred Palm Hammock has come around and life is blooming and buzzing and howling like life wonts to do.