In the Garden

“Much was said and one thing I talked about was my walk to work everyday, 90 minutes one way, always, under any condition.

You see, I said, I know nothing about burning calories, keep track of no number about my body and what the long walks are doing to me health-wise. I walk because I enjoy walking. Love it. Gets me high. I am playing in God’s garden. God blesses me with this body and this world and I bless him back.”

“By the Roadside” in Dear Eugene

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Dear Alex,

You see it but not with eyes. The restaurants are hollow, theaters blank. You know the chill of headlines and jargons in your lungs, inhaling fear more potent than the virus. We hoard grief over microscopic forces that have injured our capitalistic health presumably immune to rampant lockdown until now.

And this is prelude to looking down the chain reaction with macro lens. By next year when the first vaccine may be batched, the hatching of resistant viral strains will have snatched our preemptive victory song.

No economic stimulus can bail us from our ambitious discontent in transatlantic exposure. The more I want, the less I keep. He wants more; she hoards all. The natural laws in giving and sharing clash with the calculus of borrowing thrills and sowing gluttony in overrated credits.

Our long walks with consumerism are grinding not to a halt but with jaw-clenching resistance. For the first time in world history, we are smart enough to design artificial intelligence but duped in resigning our liberties to the contagion of catastrophe crossing thresholds and cellular membranes. Our weakest links, the aging and encaged in isolation and your airborne droplets may lump into a sum of death.

Last year encircling this theme and time, you wrote about long walks to work, everyday and always, playing in God’s garden. Your words still flow in spontaneity, losing track of utility, casual about knowledge, deep in serious play.

I saw a similar sort of garden for game when I visited a welder yesterday evening with my daughter. Nearly 90 years young at play, he granted us a tour of his metal shop shiny and busy with his handmade sculptures in alloy and rivets. Hunching over his benchwork of art for customers who knew him only by referrals, he told us about pain and pleasure through his course of long walks from serving the army in youth to working as a tradesman in mills, by roadside, along rivers and marshes and through panic and peace and plague to arrive at last at this workstation in the first of this pandemic era.

The welder sees the unseen with eyes - the abundance of grace in change, wind raging in mind, garden for long walks in longing for fellowship, sparks of delight in the dark.

Yours, Kate