True Dirt

making our gardens

I had to leave the office and take a walk. Bad news is like a booster rocket. It propels you into space. So I'm walking the streets of Oakland trying to find some balance, some solace. There's not much. Downtown has its charms and agreeable architecture but the best of it still reeks of the landscape architect's municipal template. Still, it is better to be outside where the mid-March plane trees wave bare limbs against a cool blue sky.

I walk and think about my life. I try to figure out the ways I might have deceived myself, been blind, erred, and otherwise created the mess I have found myself in. It is not really obvious. But I know in my heart that at the heart of my troubles is my own failure to see or do something I needed to see or do.

I'm back at Frank Ogawa Plaza now, in front of City Hall, a big white wedding cake of Beaux Arts stone frillery. There are newly potted flowers at the foot of the great bronze entry doors. Primroses. Perfectly symmetric dots of carnival color in colorless cement basins. Perfectly hideous, I think, drawn out of my self-musings by the startlingly ugly sight of them.

And at that I knew something. We make our gardens. They do not get made by nature or fate or god but by our own intent. How that comes out isn't always what we imagined and sometimes isn't to our liking. Efforts are rewarded--sometimes with true beauty. Sometimes with primroses in cement.

Posted by briggs at March 25, 2005 4:18 PM | TrackBack