The Garden

These two furry might look cute, and in fact, they really are. In fact, if you've got some veggie crudite to offer, neither will mind letting you scratch them between the ears; however, they've taken a liking to Fr. Desmond (Des) Purcell's roses, and now they're quickly rising to the top of the "endangered list" here on the Canisius College grounds.

A few flower shots before they're eaten...

So, you might be wondering, why the attention to the garden, to paying attention to the small things and smelling the roses, as it were. As the world goes down the economic tubes, fires are raging, and people are attacked by great white sharks (three in three weeks!), perhaps you're thinking there must be something more weighty and profound to reflect on in this blog. But somehow, taking time to smell the roses strikes me as a very sensible thing to do... one of the great temptations during these frightening and precarious times is to do something, anything, to try fixing our situation. Anxiety can provoke us to leaping before we look-- to all kinds of rash actions. I know, easy for me to say, as I spend eight months in this tertianship bubble.

But I wonder if these aren't also the times when we feel most alive, the times of crisis and opportunity that we will eventually tell stories about. Think of how experiences like the Great Depression affected our grandparents and great grand parents... formative times that often make a deep and lasting effect on who and what we become. So, is this not a time to pause, smell the flowers, be mindful about our priorities and purposes, and hold steady in our values while at the same time, adapting to circumstances as flexibly as we can?