The Gator King
2020 didn’t just say “hold my beer.” 2020 moved to a swamp in Florida.
On an air boat.
Wearing a gator-skin cowboy hat.
With an eagle feather, because 2020 is “part Cherokee.”
And founded its own gator farm.
2020 is now demanding to be called the Gator King.
Or so riffed me and my friends a few weeks back as we processed the ongoing terribleness of the state of the world. COVID-19 and a vacuum of national leadership dealing with it. A new spate of murders by police and others of unarmed Black Americans and the grotesque response of police in many cities to the protests. The still-looming crisis of global warming. An anxiety-inducing election. 2020 is a real dumpster fire of a year.
As winter turned to spring in my part of the world, just as we began staying home, I found myself paying attention to the plant life of my trails and parks, particularly wild flowers, in a way I never had before. I got an app for my phone and started pointing it at anything with petals, wanting to know the names of things, or at least the names that we have given them. Naturally these flowers surrounded me every spring but this year, because of the smallness of my world under pandemic lockdown, I had time and space to really notice them.
It’s easy in times like these to feel like things are newly or particularly terrible, to wonder why this is happening or why it’s happening now. But as adrienne maree brown writes, “I don’t think things are getting worse, I think they’re getting uncovered.” Racist violence and police brutality are not new. What’s new is the amount of attention, outrage, and focus they are getting. COVID-19 was likely literally uncovered when humans encroached on the habitats of animals—maybe bats, maybe pangolins—and brought the virus from them to us. So in that sense 2020 does not qualify as uniquely bad but, rather, light has gotten into the corners of things, revealing them, uncovering them.
I think of the flowers. Part of the delight I’ve found in learning about them has been discovering their common names. Camas. Bird vetch. Pacific bleeding heart. Common selfheal. Loosestrife. These last two resonate with and delight me. “Loosestrife” seems like an odd name for this pink popsicle of blossoms, making their careful way through a riot of blackberries and daisies and other miscreants. But it feels like such an apt descriptor for now. The strife! It is loose! And how much could we all use a little common selfheal, a balm for the wound of now?
We stand at a crossroads, a rollercoaster poised at the top of a climb. Perhaps all of life is always already a network of crossroads. We can choose to ignore what has been uncovered. Or we can be open to what is emerging.
