Colorado Natives

Beltane                                                                    Closing Moon

Colorado Native Plants. The books are out and water stained: Colorado Flora, Colorado Noxious Weeds, Native Plants of Mt. Falcon. The also water stained plant list for Mt. Falcon has check marks for the plants I need to know. Went through about half of them yesterday, the other half today.

In studying the very specific nomenclature for plant identification, I got a new appreciation for medical jargon. In writing and communication with other doctors and nurses it is necessary to name the various parts of the anatomy with specificity. Otherwise, the wrong limb gets cut-off or the wrong organ removed.

It is a comfortable feeling to take out books, arrange them in a particular way so they can be referenced easily, to create a plan for learning what I need to know and then execute it. This is an ordered world, one I know well. A safe, predictable world. Today, I need that.

This paintbrush is a beautiful flowering plant, one you may already know, Castilleja integra, the Foothills Paintbrush. It’s in bloom right now, creating impressionist dashes of color as it flowers in otherwise green fields of cheatgrass and yucca.

Permit one thought on mortality. These plants in the foothills of the Rockies have long evolutionary histories, often involving millions of years and thousands of miles, some crossing continents as continental drift shaped and reshaped earth’s land masses. They grown on soil covering rock created in the Archean eon, preceded only by the Hadean. Plants, animals and one-celled creatures have been living and dying on the thin, fertile layer below them for millions of years.

Our own lives are part of that same living and dying, drawing our sustenance from the same thin layer. Yes, each individual life is unique and precious, but each individual life is also ordinary and unremarkable, life and death being not rare, but mundane.