Nature’s Default Is Tender

I’ve been growing purple shamrocks in my kitchen. They are very delicate clovers, with petals that fold down at night. Having a plant that visibly changes shape makes it feel much more sentient and present in my day. The stalks and leaves are soft and fragile. If I bump it or graze it, I can permanently deform and bend it. I dropped a rag on it once and broke every stem.

A friend of mine in college slipped on his skateboard and hit his head on the curb. He died three weeks later of a swollen brain.

How can things be so fragile? How did we evolve to be so soft? Why wouldn’t we all be as armored as a hippo? And toothed as a tiger?

It is spring now in Southern California and the fields are full of poppies. These flowers, like my shamrocks, are delicate as a wet paper towel. And yet they abound. By the millions. If you pluck one, it is wilted and dead within the hour.

Now imagine, these clovers and flowers have evolved for a hundred million years to be as they are now. They have lived in this harsh world of death and fire, and stayed soft. They do not have thorns. They do not have hard bark. How?

Here I am, another writer making a metaphor of flowers. The curse of basicness that hits every person in Spring. But I can’t help but take heart in the thought that while the black widow and the rattlesnake evolved, while the pangolin and the Great White Shark evolved, so too did flowers and clovers and butterflies, so easily crushed and yet shimmering with color.

If softness is everywhere, it must be that tenderness is the default. If this clover can grow in the forest, and reproduce for millennia, it must be that being trampled is rare, that peace and tranquility are to be expected.

The reason the motto for the News is ‘if it bleeds it leads,’ is because bleeding is newsworthy, cozy comfort is not.

But we cannot forget that the earth, the pale blue dot, is covered in soft plants and crisp air and snowy mountains and lapping beaches.

It must be that if a field in Spring is exploding with color, that gentle flowers are the way of the world.

It’s good to remember the beauty in a world that screams the blood.

Love y’all,

Jed.