Life is a Verb

Life is a verb.  Grammarians would dispute this on technical grounds, but their correctness rings hollow in the experience of life itself.  All is movement -- seed to stem to leaf to fruit to seed again and compost; sand to stone; falling rain to rising evaporation.  Life is in motion -- a concerto moving among allegros and andantes; whole notes and sixteenths and triplets and rests, but the music never really ends.   Because life is a verb.

I should know that.  At how many gravesides have I stood and spoken words of both gratitude and hope?  How many seeds have I gently covered and patiently watered and prayerfully beckoned?  How many buckets of manure have I spread -- waste and promise miraculously united?  I should know it, but I lose myself putting one foot in front of the other; the movement itself distracting from the movement.

And then there are the dawnings.  On this particular one the dogs had been walked, the chickens had been released and in the gray haze of an emergent day I was stumbling my way back inside for a first cup of coffee when something about the bud pods of the poppies in the front bed flashed color.  The green/gray pod was still there, but along with it a bright orange unmistakably flamed.  It was, as I focused my attention, a garden birthing in-process.  There, outside our front door, a horticultural obstetrics unit was in full operation.  I stood and watched, but though I detected no movement the stasis was more apparent than real.  Life was moving forward. By lunchtime the blossom was complete and on full and expansive display.

And, though I shudder to admit it, it was similarly on its way beyond the crest to decay.

Because life is a verb, always moving.  Opening and closing.  More often than I care to admit I am too caught up in its flow to notice.  But every now and then a flash of color where it had not been and my eyes are wet with birth.  And I remember.

And am grateful.

It's hard to know what other births might interrupt my steady plod through these hours, but I will be watching for color, listening for newborn cries, reverencing the slightest moves.

Because though it's easy to miss it moving, life is a verb.