Winter

I walked south Yesterday. Following the creek all the way from my house to the criss cross of overpasses that thread the western edges of the inner city.

There was a man pruning his fruit trees in his front yard along the way. Winter tasks. Cutting back bare, cold branches. Emptiness. Death. Survival. Waiting. I looked to my left and down the steep embankment where the water threads its way through the back blocks and overgrown slices of ground that are no good to anyone, was a flourishing family of what looked like Madonna lillies. Their delicate white curling chalices stood brightly and regally in the winter sun. A hidden testimony. A witness. A prophesy. That unlike our carefully controlled and manipulated lives and environments, where wildness roams, you can be arrested by unlikely, shocking beauty and unwarranted Grace.

Further along, a myna bird was bathing in the creek near a bridge. He sunned and dried himself on the concrete embankment that has been covered in fresh grafitti. Then a troupe of Sparrows did the same thing. Swooping down out of nowhere into the creek, fluttering their wings and puffing out their feathers in the cold, running water, then taking to the air again as one mind. One entity. Disappearing again into nowhere.

And then I began to notice something. Eucalyptus wattle. Brilliant red and yellow little fronds with sweet tips. Bright pink Geraniums. Pale Roses. The most luminous little expressions of life were finding my eyes where ever I looked. Even while many stood in the cold damp of their gardens menacing the empty branches with flashing blades . Why hadn't I noticed this before? It was a stark contrast to the previous three winters, where mostly I looked out on the bare Apricot tree by the fence. Sat in the cold with the emptiness and waited. Prayed cold prayes to a cold God. Just like that silent tree with its barren limbs by the fence. Expecting nothing from the absence of life or growth but the absence of life or growth.

But now, meandering south along the the creek, with the thoughts of a dead season still lingering, and not a thought of anything but the darkness and emptiness around, suddenly I couldnt seem to help but bump into life. Poking out from insignificant and abandoned spaces in the urban landscape. A reminder perhaps, that growth and budding occurs in some, even while in others there is only death at work in the limbs.