It is a cold, gray afternoon. Worries weigh on my mind like the nimbostratus, filled with rain, that hover over the land.
In search of a wise, earthy voice, I seek Mary Oliver’s poetry in my library. I come upon the poem “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater.” These verses strike me as the message I was non-consciously seeking:
I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.
Who could find me?
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things
or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
Blue Iris (2004)
Her verses immediately remind me of another friend of my heart-soul, Henry David Thoreau, who writes:
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.
Walden, “Where I Lived, What I Lived For”
I am once again summoned to simplify, to be like the wild flowers in Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”:
And why are you worried about clothing? Notice how the lilies of the field grow; they do not labor nor do they spin thread for cloth, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
Matthew 6: 28-29 (New American Standard Bible)
And so I walk outside into my garden and regard the red lilies that have bloomed, showing themselves among the green leaves of the anthurium plants.
And I remember the wild flowers, shaped like stars, that I have seen over the past few months in my travels around Costa Rica.
These flowers’ forms remind me of the the simplicity and the unity in diversity that pervades the cosmos. At once I am pacified.
Daniel G. Campos 