Dark Cloud Country: Relationship 3, Art

"Community and its love requires the power to hurt, and it requires the complete self-limitation of that thing they most do show—the usage of this power. But it does not allow its eradication."

This is the third section or “Relationship” of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

Relationship Three: Art

Out of the intangible pall over the face of things, a gentle but thick grace of growth explodes from the depths. Why it surfaces here no one knows, but it does and it does so very well. Her first leaves are opposite ovals that seem to cling like fungus to the brittle, brown stem. They are fragile and often hide beneath the oxidizing canopy of cool season grasses that wither and wane under the summer’s new heat. Soon, she will transform into tall triumvirates of clustered triangles adorned with marshaled flowers fused at their bases. But not yet. Sericea lespedeza frequently visits this landscape when spring has sufficiently left, and its animals are ready for a good cleaning. She waits. Under the formless fever of summer’s humidity, sericea triumphs and becomes the marvelous maid of the meadow.

Life is the conjoining of the old and the new—new species, or maybe old species made new in its specific surfacing—but so also is art. Art and its poetry is the conjoining of the old with the new—old beliefs with new awareness, old happenings with fresh metaphors or colors. In this way, art is powerful because she is a coyote in sheep’s clothing, as she is a sheep that is somehow also a coyote. But sericea lespedeza knows this, for she is a phytochemically-packed and protein-powered instrument of pollination—she is beauty and health and clarity and creation itself. In this way, she tells us that beauty and lucidity may be intertwined in the meadow’s drama, but lucidity is the temporary luxury for the eternal beauty of purpose—of her florid form’s function. She is beauty, but her beauty carries a powerful protein. Her grace of growth, her marshaled flowers.

It is sericea that often draws me to beauty and its art. Many wildflowers grow in the Wildland, but it is sericea’s great trick that captivates me—beauty’s gravity subjugates my attention, but her phytochemical punch satiates my needs.  Beauty and purpose, this is art.