Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a single patch of clover blossoms, stubbornly bright against the otherwise uniformly-green expanse of lawn. On a day where the weather had been hotter, they may have escaped my notice entirely, passed over as I shielded my eyes from the sun, squinting my way through the park path without stopping. But the overcast sky and halfhearted heat this afternoon had made stopping to lie in the grass all but inevitable.
One has to wonder how a little patch of clover blossoms survives the human impulse to landscape and manicure urban green spaces, but there it is, growing, cheeky as you please.
Sunday afternoons are the province of young families, of lovers out holding hands, of friends chatting idly as they walk to nowhere in particular. There is a father out catching insects with his son (Dad is in charge of the net, Son carries the insect habitat around his neck); a boyfriend and girlfriend taking selfies on a park bench; a toddler running into his delighted father’s open arms; an elderly woman walking her dog; a family of four tourists chatting in a foreign language; a couple on a first date teasing one another and giggling loudly; two brothers running ahead of their parents on the park path, and then stopping to make sure that they’re still being followed.
I’m none of the above.
I sit out of the way with a bag full of gourmet breads, a little carton of milk, and a notebook that I pretend is a field diary, where I can record my observations on the little slice of humanity flowing past my spot on the grass.
If I were a flower, I think I would be friends with that patch of clover blossoms.
We have some things in common.
The longer a person stays stationary in a garden, the more human, the more a part of nature they become, and I am no exception. Ants may shy away from your sudden intrusion at first, but stay long enough and you become their mountain, a gauntlet upon which they can prove their worth. Or a strange highway over which they can ferry their building materials.
A person may flick ants off of themselves, but a human rarely feels the need to.
When you are calm enough for the ants to take a liking to, the birds will no longer simply fly overhead, but land curiously in the grasses around you, bits of bread in-beak. If you wouldn’t hurt an ant, then surely you wouldn’t hurt a bird.
And if you wouldn’t hurt a bird, then maybe you are a human at peace enough with nature not to hurt a rat. One may stick its nose out from a bush, stare at you with gentle, cautious eyes, and then dash past you into a den hidden underneath another patch of flowers and shrubbery.
Grasshoppers will hug the tallest blades of grass for just a little longer each time, observing you warily, strange, largely hairless mammalian intruder that you are.
I don’t think butterflies have a care for anything other than beautiful flowers, but you can take their presence around you as a little gift all the same.
This very small garden kingdom becomes yours for a while, if you let your own humanity breathe for long enough over the course of an afternoon.
.
August 18, 2019. 新港中央広場.