I’ve never been buzzed by a hummingbird before.
Or two or five.
As if in a dare, they darted fearless, while I wrote at my canyon top perch in the midst of their breakfast. Cocooned by a radiant explosion of pinks, lavenders, and orange blossoms, I basked happy as a clam with a pearl.
Fluttering up to eighty beats a second, their wings hummed a steady chorus in the symphony of nature. Two waltzed in tandem, hovering before my eyes, ignoring me like I was just another piece of the scenery.
A finch zoomed to the fifteen foot tall Yucca towering over the valley. Flashes of orange from his beak distinguished him from his drab brown cousins. The air hung melodious as the birds gossiped across the crisp sunrise.
A rooster calls shrill in the distance.
A lone car winds down the road, crunching gravel under greedy tread,
Unseen, yet an unwelcome clatter in my commune with nature.
The jarring sounds of civilization.
Decker Canyon, Malibu CA
A Norfolk pine, two stories tall leans elegant into the view.
Growing up we had one gifted. Of course being from West Texas, it was regaled to a pot on the dining room table. Native to Norfolk island in the Pacific near Australia, it can reach heights of two hundred feet.
In our arid climate, not happening.
In it’s first months, we adored this housewarming gift with it’s quaint pine-tree-shape and luxurious boughs. We marveled at the softness of the foliage unlike the prickly needles on the pines we knew from our New Mexico jaunts.
But within a year it wasn’t looking so good. It listed heavy to one side, as if reaching for the window, pleading for escape. Watering was irregular at best. I guess we should have figured it out, but no one told us it had to turned weekly for even growth. And its it’s bottom branches began to brown. A few are normal. This was more than a few.
Why a florist in the High Plains would sell such a plant is beyond me. Enthralled with it’s charming shape, maybe they didn’t know this conifer needed at least fifty percent humidity to thrive. Our semi-arid atmosphere provided a pleasant low humidity for humans and we began to whine about “such a humid day” if it rose to a whopping fifty percent.
The solution offered? Buy a humidifier and place it in the same room to help it prosper. ALL FOR A SILLY PLANT.
Of course we didn’t, and the tree limped along. It’s disproportionate shape became floppy and awkward. The tiny new growth on top looked like a spiky mohawk above flowing locks. It had no resemblance to the elegant pine tree we once adored.
I’m not sure what ever happened to the tree. I went away to college and never saw it again. Not that I even gave it a second thought until now.
But I don’t have to limp along, hampered by external conditions and forgetful caretakers. I am the adored child of God most high. A God who nurtures me and will never forget me. I can choose him rather than pinning my hopes and dreams on people and circumstances that disappoint me again and again.
So I will choose to flourish.
Even in the desert.
Or the trials that pelt and sting like the violent dust laden winds of West Texas. (You Westies know what I’m talking about).
I will flourish because he promises me.
“The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon…” Jeremiah 12:2
I will be blessed
I will be rooted and nourished
I will not fear
I will choose to be a blessing to others.
“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.”
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8
-What holds you back from flourishing in God’s peace?