Empty Garden

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"

**********

Dear Kate,

It's like going to a disaster zone to take stock of loss: Granville Island is no longer how I knew her.

Yesterday I didn't take any picture inside, felt it's obscene to, like pulling out a camera at a funeral, snapping the anamnesis of a spirit that has exited the room long before I entered it.  I came too late and shall ever trail behind the goodbye lingering at all directions: the malevolent absence of Halloween's benevolent ghouls, the thanksgiving spirit of autumn harvest, Santa without a cause.  I prayed for a time warp, as all prayers do.

Right beside the produce market there used to be a flower shop.  Now I can see the bared concrete ground beneath the beauty, but for the life of me couldn't recall how beauty-full it once was.  To step in the corner and count the square-footage, mentally I did, I realized how small the space, how vast the emptiness is.  How could it have once contained a garden there?

If I am to pray for the garden's flourishing again, am I asking for her economical prosperity, or for the profit of her being kind and calm and and safe as the ends, her goals of prospering, not her means to get where she wants to go economically?

No doubt there is a link between economic prosperity and human flourishing--but what is it, the link? And if we are not flourishing despite good and ever-bettering economic prospects, what are the missing links?

Yours, Alex