Report from the Houston Arboretum

Report from the Houston Arboretum

I am back at the Prairie Field Station to check on the nature of things. We are having spectacular May weather in Houston this week. Low humidity. Upper 70s. Sunshine. Flowers bloom in sunny places throughout the Houston Arboretum – around the Nature Center, among the grasses, by the ponds and along paths.

Here at the meadow, a change stirs inside you the longer you sit and be still. At first, it seems quiet. Eventually, your ears pick up the chatter, rustle and shush of the natural world and you realize this spot of Earth is anything but silent. The squirrel gives away his position in the leaves. Birds fly errands and report back. Leaves rustle in the breeze. Winds over prairie grass seem to ask, now and then, for visitors to please keep it down – shuuush. Life speaks. A human’s home, on the other hand, entombed in drywall, has little to say, as it is nearly dead; you must put life into it. Light wind from the Southeast today brings no news of a pandemic or of controversial social adjustments.

One finds eternity in the forest, where evolution unfolds at its own pace beneath the impatient feet of mortals. Perhaps a moment of true presence in nature is worth a week of struggle for wealth and position. Maybe. I don’t know. But it does feel as if the universe deems the schedules of man unimportant. In a prairie or on a beach or hillside or riverbank, time does not tick in discrete increments, as in offices: time flows. An instant in the vastness of the Universe is not a manmade hour, a year or a hundred million years: it just is.

Moments are everywhere. Mankind, racing the clock, misses most of them. Here comes one now. Far off to the south, on tracks that skirt the eastern edge of the arboretum, a freight train whistles, prelude to an afternoon concert of steel wheel, rail, wooden tie and gravel. Softly at first, then louder, the conductor drives his orchestra to the chorus, rousing the great syncopated bang and scrape of the beast’s arrival and departure. Long crescendo and equal decrescendo. The song ends slowly, softly, until hush returns to the forest. The meadow has slept through the whole thing.

Guy D. Johnson

Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.