Clothed in spring.

An excerpt from “John Redding Goes to Sea” 1921:


Springtime in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellows blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from north. The miles of hyacinths lie like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. The nights are white nights for the moon shines with dazzling splendor, or in the absence of that goddess, the soft darkness creeps down laden with innumerable scents. The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.



This paragraph is important. It was part of Zora Neale Hurston's first published short story in the literary magazine of Howard University. The paragraph is for some, too indulgent in detail. For some, the plot was overdone. I've only read this paragraph of the story, and still am glad that she wrote it. I also happen think that it's beautiful.


She took a risk by making this intimate gift of her writing public. She was born at just the right time for this manner of self-expression; her literature, rich with renderings of black culture and folklore at the outset of the Harlem Renaissance. But I'm sure there was a moment she hesitated to share it. A moment that if she yielded to her insecurity, I wouldn't be celebrating her artful prose.


This is the gift of community, the risk that makes writing slightly embarrassing. Committing words on paper is unavoidably introspective and mixed with a fear that what we've created is not really "us". Or if it is "us" that it is not what we wanted to see about ourselves. But if what we've written is honest, it will indicate the distance between who we are what we long to be.This is a hinting at our true identities.



The disparity between what we say and what we do is hypocrisy. We are least desirable in our own eyes when we trade actions for words and they grow anemic. We are most beautiful when in humility, our actions leave no need for words. I want no headstone for my life, because I would like it lived with entirety, with nothing left to say when its done, but these simple words of Jesus: "It is finished." This kind of life is barely the one I am living now, though the one I am stumbling toward. All my obsessive fears, anxieties and inconsolable longings are for a wholeness that I have yet to taste in food, or laughter or friends. They are for the meantime--joyful preoccupations, but only stand-ins and shadows of the greater things.


The tempestuous spring stirs all of these thoughts within me, and I am dividing reluctantly to events beyond my control, like the flowers in Hurston's story.  I want the clothing of nature: the flower's glorious potential achieved in simply being alive. It has no concern for the heat of day,or the cool of night for each will come at it's appointed time. Yet at the looming storms, I shirk this kind of flower-like peace, to toil for what cannot be gained without surrender: the use of my gifts, the cultivation of relationships, the quieting of all my discontentment and the courage to communicate his power in both word and deed.


Without animation from his Spirit that brings me daily life, I close up like a plant without rain, and well with no spring or animation within. And he asks me again:


“So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?" Matthew 8:28-30.


It then becomes not a matter of control, but the assurance that what shakes loose in a rumbling storm is the sweetness of rain. Open is the only way to receive.