Jaci Dawn

My morning break at work this morning included a walk around the strip mall where I work. It’s a pleasant walk: a lot of privacy, greenery, even a duck pond when I want to go that way. Rain threatened, and some drops fell, but it was warm. Pleasant.

I picked up a cherry blossom that had been blown off one of the many trees making up the landscaping. Delicate. Pink, red veined, and multi-layered, the stamens yellow, and the weight of it insignificant. A blossom. So fragile, so temporary, so beautiful. So intricate in design.

It is, at moment like this, when I think that lack of faith in a Greater Being takes more faith than I have. The tiniest of creations: the mite upon the mite that lives in my eyelashes, for instance. The delicate beauty of a blossom that will only be open a few days, but is so delicately arranged and created. An apple blossom that only needs a bee to complete the pollination, and there will be an apple in the late summer. God seems closer when viewed from the minute. God seems larger, and yet – less large – when one considers the design of life.

I dropped the blossom under a flowering tree, and as it fell, I felt my father’s hand brush mine. Or my mother’s. Or both. Papery thin, warm. I felt my sister’s skin under my touch as I braided her hair one last time. Tactile memories of people who have passed from this dimension to another. I felt their presence beside me. Fleeting memory.

How do you go back to work after such a spiritual phenomenon? It is hard to concentrate. Hard to think in the logical planes of every day existence. Spiritual things are not logical. Logic is a man-made concept of filing and order (I raise my hand: I am guilty!). Then spiritual happens, and you’re left standing on the side of the road, wondering how you could possibly have felt your father touch you, and he’s been gone for nearly six years?

Think of friends in life and death struggles: if God could create this blossom, could God not heal a four-year-old child held captive in his own mind by a disease? I said a prayer for Xander. He’s a four year old boy trapped, the grandson of a dear friend, and the victim of a debilitating disease that has left him trapped in his own mind. I have my own grandchildren and can only imagine.

Still – that cherry blossom. So delicate. So intricate. So fragile. So fleeting. I can’t believe it was created by chaos, by a random explosion in space a bazillion years ago. How did that create life? How did that create cherry blossoms? Or four year olds? Or give me that passing moment “between” when my parents touched my hand as I dropped the blossom back to the earth?

I have no concrete answers and you can comment or argue until the sun sets and rises again. I just think it takes more faith to not believe in something than it takes to believe. Take the fleeting flower blossom…