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Wandering through Awesome
I must be an irritating traveler whether walking or riding or flying. I’m just flat in awe of the simplest things. And I say look, see, do you see that? or wow, what a taste, a smell, a sound… things in us that get charged up and beautified by just being normal, just taking a walk, just sucking on a fresh orange for energy after a tennis match or just listening to music that brings back memories, like Roberta Flack. I insist - look at this, did you know this? Wow, where did this come from? What wonders God does and then allows us to enjoy, if only for a moment. I never stay in a group because I want to see something close up, snap a photo, or smell a smell that is completely strange and new. I prefer to wander on my own.
 On my morning walks along the tiny strip of beach beside the Rio de la Plata, I am in awe of the simplest things - from the crunched baby white shells (what did they hold?) to the Nile like grasses which, until this winter just passed, had not crept down the river in front of our house, and now there are sprouting up and act as a home for a dozen ducks and white birds and palomas and those noisy Taro Taros that are damned if you are going to get near their nest, wherever that is. I’ve never seen their nests, but the birds start screaming taro-taro-taro loud as a horn too close to your ears when near it. I try to make a wider circle past them, but nothing makes them happy.
But what really awes me - me who used to be an award-winning gardener who had to have everything perfectly pruned, cleaned, unusual and with not a single out of place grass blade or dead geranium or worn rose petal - is how far behind that me is in my heart. I’m in the now, 20 years later, overwhelmed this spring, by the massive variety of wild flowers and weeds growing along the banks of the river right before our eyes - like bushes of wild white petunias (apparently Uruguay is where petunias originated I was told) and the incredible purple- sapphire blue morning glory big as a breakfast plate just opened for me as I walked nearby. And the truth of it is I don’t know their names, just that they make me rejoice that God cares for this earth and one doesn’t have to be an expert horticulturalist to get the maximum Ahhhh!
How beautiful! are the tiny purple three-pronged flowers an inch off the ground (seems a lot of purple, a lot of white, and some yellow are favored colors of the wild bunch). Our fragrant lavender shrub has quadrupled in size just since spring began, about to interrupt our use of the steps. My husband won’t cut the grass, so we have a wild weed meadow growing around our yard that is embarrassing to me, but yet… I would have missed the white, yellow, purple wild flowers that are popping up all over the place between that long blades of grass that are as varied as the flowers. It’s complex but wonderful. (Note: the grass was finally cut and now a bevy of birds are there in the early morn pecking at bugs that had hidden there.
It’s like seeing a child smile when he or she learns something new or receives a toy when he or she has never had a toy, and they try to figure out what to do with it, or the child who puts a tiny foot in the river or ocean wave and turns and smiles before running back across the deep sand to proud parent or when a dog finally does his catch a ball trick, or an elderly folk remembers something from youth and gets up and dances. Glory Be. Hallelujah. All these are God’s awesome moments for you and for me.
We don’t need all the perfection we require in our purchases, our thoughts, our hearts - we just need a surprise, a joyful glance, a smell that perks up memory, or a tree that surprises because it peels its bark like the giant Eucalyptus, which could be a nuisance, but it speaks of newness or regeneration, and for a decade Uruguayans have planted the fast growing tree for a hefty business with China, selling them the bark for paper. Destinations of things once beautiful are suspect, but at least helping the economy.
The cotton trees in Memphis, where cotton, once world-wide center of the true cotton industry, really flies all over your yard in springtime. One sneezes as if it was pollen. And my all-time favorite flowering tree is the “palo borracho” (Drunken Tree) in Uruguay that, nestles near the purple jacarandas and red ciebos, because it has strange flowers and a trunk that looks like it’s made from fingernails. Google Uruguayan trees for a real treat.
We don’t need to depend on having so much stuff if we just look around at what God has given us for free to make life joyful. Hanging the laundry one day in a messy back area of our yard, I saw incredible mushrooms (no, I didn’t eat them, or even think about it) but their shape and colors was exquisite, crouched in the corner of some concrete pathway here in the banario outside Carmelo. I snapped some photos on my iPhone, sent them to my daughter Mary who knows a lot about mushrooms, and she told me what they were. How beautiful. I didn’t plant those (or anything in our current yard) but something in the soil or lack of attention but a proper environment allowed them to grow there. A surprise gift from God. Look in your yard at various moments of the year. I bet there is some sort of mushroom surprise that will pop up like a fairytale.
I think I irritate people, though, when I travel. I constantly say - Oh look at that, wow, look at this - and I bore people to death, I think, with why this, what’s the name of this. I love everything new and even revisiting the old, like the empty tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or the fresh petals made into a design by a maid in a resort to make our day happy or a Japanese omelet in the Shinkansen fast train’s railroad station (I didn’t stop talking about that for a month!!). I once encountered a grizzly bear picking berries on the pathway in the Tetons - best to stop and breathe deep and know it is a treasure from God to have that surprise, as one backs slowly out of the picture so as not to disrupt the bear’s meal. Or what about a curious moose entering our drive way while the Labrador dog barks like crazy, and yet, you have the delight of seeing the moose in full bloom, trying to find a way to wherever he has to be carrying those enormous antlers.
When it comes to food, I get overwhelmed and love to try those 12-15 course chef’s choice meals where the serving is tiny tiny tiny - just a taste - but the presentation and the flavor is a Wow Awesome, as it was in Madrid. Then there is a trip in Thailand through a sweets bazaar which tops my list. Any sushi freak like me takes a challenge equal to dangling off a cliff each time one tries something new and yes, I did try the “could kill you” fish (Fugu or Blowfish) when in Kyoto - or the fermented green tea salad in Burma, a common people’s meal, which I could eat the rest of my life but, won’t have that opportunity again.
It’s little surprise experiences that make life true. If you visit tons of churches, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, basilicas, castle, homes, there is always some ah-ha somewhere in the experience of each, something that makes you smile, pray, hope, believe, knowing you probably will not pass that way again, but you were there once. Light those candles, pray for peace and friendship and for the world to hold hands rather than box each other in the face. We can make this earth more amazing if everyone will quit wanting power and instead share what we have with those who have nothing to share. Show each other joy. And, of course, Love and understanding. Rejoice.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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