Right now we’re in an earthquake of flowers.  All at once.  The crabapple and cherry blossoms went mad with blooms three weeks early and are now shaking their petals onto the daffodils and tulips.  Crocus and grape hyacinth are practically buried.  Even phlox, forget-me-nots, lilacs, and sweet william are vying for attention.   TODAY, our local earth seems to shout.  Look at ME! May will be too late, too hot, too dry!  Holy God, even the campus evangelists have emerged, holding out bright green testaments as unfurled students walk sinfully by.

I can’t ignore the tectonics of spring, wouldn’t want to if I could.  Walking to work in the midst of so much glory, I am overcome with NOW.  This morning, I say: to hell with the future.  To hell with the fact that these flowers are blooming before bees are out to pollinate them.  To hell with the fact that last fall’s freakish temperature swing – from 65 to -5 in a day – nearly killed every shrub in our privet hedge, cultivated these last 18 years.  To hell with the summer’s impending fire season.  To hell with the neighbors activating their sprinklers a full month earlier than usual.  Come June, when this crowd of blooms has burned off and folks are watering fruitlessly into crunchy lawns, there will be time to mourn these things.  Not today.

Dostoevsky, a great narrator of the now, wrote of the final seconds before his seizures: “During a few moments I feel such happiness that is impossible to realize at other times, and other people cannot imagine it. I feel a complete harmony within myself and in the world, and this feeling is so strong and so sweet that for a few seconds of this enjoyment one would readily exchange ten years of one’s life – perhaps even one’s whole life.”  My own seizures are too mild, and too sudden, to provoke such ecstasy, but they do sharpen my attention.  I wonder whether, in the timeline of the human species, our generation is living through a kind of ecstatic blaze before darkness.  Certainly this idea is common to both the fundamentalist Christian concept of rapture and the ISIS ideology of end times — the spectrum of human thought being circular, after all, not linear — but I suspect that any apocalypse will be a slow-motion affair.  Perhaps it’s already underway.  If so, we will have time to face the future, but also live defiantly in the now — with or without flowers.