by David De Palo
Being alive, he thought he would take a stroll.
He came upon a flower.
The sun shone upon the earth, bathing one hemisphere in light.
He noticed his shadow was falling on the flower.
“No, not falling,” he mused, “but casting.”
His shadow was cast about the flower . . . and the flower did not mind.
The sun gave life to the flower, and yet it came and went with night and day, weather, seasons, trees, animals. So much about the flower was tenuous--dependent--and so much was fearless and strong.
And yet, the flower was none of those traits.
The flower was, technically, a weed--a dandelion.
And the man was, specifically, a middle-aged white male of one-hundred, fifty-four pounds.
“There is something in this, a truth I need to learn,” he said, still staring at the flower.
The moon was somewhere up there, orbiting the earth. A fly buzzed past his ear. The galaxy spun upon the spoke of its center. His stomach growled, the sound like distant thunder.
“This flower . . . I don’t really know what it is. How extraordinary!”
He squat down, only slightly stiff from a round of tennis he’d played the day before. He could see some sort of small mites crawling between the petals.
“This flower is hosting life. This tiny flower is a world for something else.”
He scratched his curly black hair which was shot through with grey. Dandruff rained on the flower. He did not notice.
Nearby, some dandelion had molted. A gentle breeze stirred the air, wafting clouds of seed over him, liberated by the wind.
He smiled and at first did not know why. And then he did. He knew the freedom of the seedlings, the joy of the flower, the gentleness of the wind. And he understood for the first time why everything worked the way it did.
“The sun loves the flower,” he said, “and the flower loves the sun. The wind loves the seeds. The seeds love the wind. The earth, the air, the water; all of it.”
He stood, smiling, and his back foot crushed an ant, a worm, and some blades of grass. A bluejay swooped before him, catching a slow-flying moth in its beak. He breathed in, swallowing a tiny gnat. Microbes under his arms broke down sweat into acids, increasing his smell. Offshore, in the water of the bay, a fish was snared by an abandoned net. Mount Etna, five-thousand miles away in Italy, released a plume of molten rock and ash.
He smiled as he exhaled. “I see. This is love, too. The bird loves the moth. And the moth . . .”
How could the moth love the bird, he wondered? The moth fled from the bird, did it not?
He heard the electronic bells of an ice-cream truck in the distance; the song reminded him of something long forgotten. His heart beat faster, reliving a feeling he’d experienced in his youth: excitement, joy, love for the ice cream truck.
He bounced upon his toes to the music and then he knew.
“The moth does not flee,” he sang. “It dances!”
A moment of pure stillness filled his soul. All the world seemed to stop around him, a complete silence washed over his mind. His thoughts stopped and only the brilliance of the beloved filled his awareness.
His body moved him forward toward a nearby bench. Then the body sat on the bench.
A stray cat rushed over to him, rubbed its body on his leg, purring. His hand fell from his lap and the fingers idly scratched the smooth round head of the cat. The wind blew gently. The earth rotated. Somewhere, a flower opened.
