Ronnie BURK
AMAZING
Amazing how the hollyhock grows straight out of the asphalt. How does it get water? Its roots spread out beneath the ground. Hard to imagine there is earth under all this concrete.
Amazing how the lady next door gets up every morning and prepares her hot dog cart. She is getting ready to work in this heat! Today it will be a hundred degrees by eleven. Yet she will stand all day feeding others so she can go home and feed her kids.
As amazing as these little incidents are they are not award winning accomplishments. The hollyhock will not win a prize from the botanical society. Nor will the woman receive an award from the mayor's office for contributing to the city's economy.
Yet these events have deeper meanings.
For the powers of nature are an amazing thing. One day the ground will start to quake and rumble and what the hurricanes and the monsoons couldn't wash away the erupting rivers of magma will surely claim.
After many years the fires will burn out and the floods will recede. The caribou and the moose will return to the forests that will spring up from all the charred pine cones. The deer munching on acorns. The owls laying their eggs in the joshua trees.
How amazing it will be when nature finally has her way and takes back what has always been hers.
George Washington
George Washington told his father, "I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry trees. I chopped down the lemon trees. I chopped down the peach, the apple and the orange trees. I chopped down the maples and the birches. I chopped down the oaks and the pines. I chopped down the magnolias. I chopped down the banyans and the madrones. Now that the junipers are all stumps I'm chopping down the sequoias and the redwoods."