Frivolous

I walked in to the gym where I work out with Sara every week. She puts the hurt on me in a good way. The weekly white board slo­gan this week in the gym read: Life is good, and the uni­verse is on your side. I don‘t believe that the uni­verse picks a side. If it is on my side, does that mean it is not on some­one else‘s side? If you are on one side you are not on the other side. The uni­verse likely has big­ger fish to fry. Even more likely is that the uni­verse is not will­ful, and is not fry­ing fish at all.

What I see around me is a uni­verse that spends a lot of energy and time mak­ing seem­ingly friv­o­lous bits of eye candy like this bearded iris. Maybe some­thing eats these. Bees hang out around them. I live in a uni­verse that does funny things like bearded iris’. I am encour­aged by that. I know mak­ing one of these flow­ers is not easy, yet there it is. It is good that the uni­verse doesn‘t do the world the way many peo­ple would – squared off walls in shades of Pot­tery Barn taupe, shoddy, hid­den seams and use­less money back guar­an­tees. No guar­an­tees in the real, beau­ti­ful, unpre­dictable world. It is mind­less, with­out will. It is equal oppor­tu­nity – both for bru­tal­ity (as a kid I would have used this flower as bat­ting prac­tice, lop­ping off its lovely head with­out a thought) and for won­der (also as a kid I would have turned over every mil­lime­ter of this, in love with pur­ple for the first time). To need the uni­verse to be on my side lessens its awe­some­ness. It is enough on my side by being on all sides and no sides.