Small and Simple Beauty
in the Garden
I wish all of my gardens around the house, rain garden, front and back vegetable and herb gardens looked beautiful, but they do not. So I need to find beauty wherever I can in the small parts of the garden. Today it was in this flowering purple plant in front of the house, a small beauty in the garden.
Big ideas can often be told better in words. Below is an ‘easy essay’, Peter Maurin-style, I wrote today expressing a lot of big ideas in simple words.
Hypocrisy
Americans worry about the thousands and thousands of Mexicans coming illegally to the USA,
But do not seem to care much about the thousands of thousands of guns going illegally to Mexico.
The guns make life more unbearable in Mexico thus driving more Mexicans to the USA.
Peace activists cry out against the a 32 billion military supplementary bill before congress,
But ignore the 726 billion dollar Defense Department bill before congress,
While USA military spending is as great as that of all other countries with a military combined.
Everyone is concerned about the sorry state of education in America
Yet money for teachers and schools is being cut.
While “racing for the top” we are forgetting about those on the bottom.
The ‘tea party’ people call for less taxes and debt.
Yet ignore the biggest expenditure of our taxes and debt,
Military spending, some of which even the Secretary of Defense calls ‘wasteful.’
A Catholic university is accused of discriminating against a lesbian professor,
But no one says anything about the three military departments on the campus discriminating against lesbians.
The University says it did not discriminate but the professor’s views did not fit with its ‘mission and identity’.
The same University teaches “reflexive killing”, killing without conscience, and priority of government orders over conscience.
Recently I heard a renowned writer on the “fall of the American empire” being asked if had a religion.
He said he would be a “Dorothy Day”-like Christian if paying Federal Taxes and living comfortably would not make him feel like a hypocrite.
I say we are all hypocrites, not practicing what we preach,
So it is better be a hypocrite breaking the silence of our time in word and action,
Than to be a hypocrite that talks the talk but does not walk the walk.
A friend from India studying in the USA would always say when he saw something beautiful: “It is simple.” For him simple meant beautiful.
Small and Simple can be beautiful.
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