Flower in the Rock You are that strong and tenacious wild flower growing out of the crack in the gray Plymouth Rock, slashed by the cold, lashed by salt air, then healed in the late sun’s rising, storm-blessed, wind-whipped, sea-ripped, and real. At Pilgrim’s Landing you will be there to welcome the oppressed and weary, you will be their mirror and show them their own marvelous endurance. You will throw your lovely head back in sacred defiance and forbid the world to trample you. And you will prevail for hundreds of years. Alla Renée Bozarth My Blessed Misfortunes © 2014 Chief Massasoit at Coles Hill opposite Plymouth Rock, photo by Greg Kullberg, 2007, sculpted monument by Cyrus E. Dallin, 1920. Sketch artist unknown. My gravel driveway sprouted a flower last summer after I found these two lovely works of art for my Giving Thanks blog, inspiring a fusion in my mind as Mother Earths Amen contribution to my learning day of history and art. Since every breath we take has been breathed by other animals from the time our forebears climbed up on land from the amniotic waters of Mother Ocean, and since We Are All Relatives as the Lakota Nations say (Mitakuye oyasin), then I can regard the gravel in my driveway as related to that famous rock that stands for first homecoming to European immigrants who had set sail from Plymouth, England in September, and struggling against stormy winds were blown 500 miles off course, landing not in Virginia, but north to the region later named Massachusetts by European settlers after Chief Massasoit of the Wanpanoag Confederacy of tribes. A thirteenth great-granddaughter of one of the passengers of the Mayflower, perhaps there is a migrant stone in my driveway that has followed me here by strange routes, a chip off the Old Rock. Anyway, I say Thanks. Thanks for Everything, Great Spirit. And may we yet atone for our spiritual ancestors who betrayed the First Nations People by bad faith and broken promises, and also those who brought people here in chains as slaves from their homelands, later to become co-citizens with all here. Thanks, God, for the contributions of all great Americans from First Nations to Europeans to Africans to Asians, all the people of the world who live here and are blessed by the legacy of all great souls who came before and not only transcended the evils humans did to humans, but became great women and men of science, art, faith and medicine. Of profound worth are their gifts and blessed is their memory. Thanks be to God for each of them.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:24:27 +0000