Issue #41

Mantra for the desert

On a walk through a desert landscape, Husband points out a solitary flowering weed growing up from inside a rock. There’s not a drop of moisture in the air or on the ground, and none forecasted. The soil, if you can even call it that, is sand and pebbles. “Amazing,” I say.

“That’s why I think the universe is teeming with life,” he says.

“Because—?’

“Because there’s no water here. Because life persists in unlikely circumstances.”

Well. How about that. How about that as a message of hope—

Life persists in unlikely circumstances.

For that very reason I’ve always been a sucker for flowers growing up from under rocks or between cracks in a road. I’ve thought of that phenomenon less as persistence than as the urgent need of living things to live. But I like his formulation. (No surprise, persistence is one of his favorite words. It’s the answer to the question he poses every time he figures out a really tricky programming or mechanical problem: Margaret, do you know how I figured that out?)

Later I ask if I can use the phrase in my newsletter. He hesitates. He wants to clarify. “What I meant was, Look how life establishes itself in hostile conditions.”

He’s talking about life on other planets.

But I’m thinking about life on Planet Earth. I’m thinking about how difficult people’s lives can be here, now. I’m thinking about how many different ways there are for life to be difficult—financial, emotional, physical, mental. And how, whatever the particular solution to those hardships may be, the answer must begin with hope. And how hope allows for grit.

So, once more, with feeling—

Life persists in unlikely circumstances!

But let’s make it punchier—

Life persists!

—and prescriptive—

Persist.

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Bet your bottom dollar that—tomorrow—

It was not the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of colder air and harsh weather, it was the end of fall color. From the window we watched hail and high winds batter the pretty leaves out front, causing them to fall sooner than we wanted.

“We’ll always have yesterday,” my daughter said with a sigh.

Seconds later the hail stopped. The light became golden. A rainbow appeared. A full end-to-end rainbow. Then a double rainbow.

As Fats Waller would say, One never knows, do one?

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