Good Lord, deliver me

From the cowardice that dare not face new truths,
From the laziness that is contented with half-truth,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me.
- Kenyan prayer

It's been an interesting few months. At the moment, i'm feeling a bit like Judas. We tend to vilify him, but i bet Judas thought he was doing the right thing. (Not that his motivation absolves him.) Maybe he feared Jesus was really going to accept the acclaim of the people and be a puppet king to the Sanhedrin, and if Judas was a Zealot, well, he'd have thought it was better Jesus be dead. Or maybe he hoped to force Jesus' hand into striking down the Roman dogs with the power of the Almighty when they came to arrest him. Who knows? But i feel a bit like a traitor. Although i did what seemed wisest and best, and it still does seem wise and best, nonetheless it is unpleasant. I was in over my head. I still am.

I'm by no means going to go hang myself and spill my guts in a field.

On a related topic, honest it is: Last week i faced a weakness i didn't know i had. It was a good reminder to be humble: i'm susceptible. It was also a great reminder of God's graciousness in that He provides a way out of every temptation, a way that doesn't involve succumbing to it. The way out in this case meant not getting as close to the temptation as is technically allowed. Heck, allowed by almost any measure! But i can resist from here (and it's not running away). Get any closer though and i may not. I don't care to see how close i can get: the risk/reward is not worth it. [EDIT: I know, i know, "resist the devil" and "flee temptation". I backed up enough that it counts as fleeing; no temptation from this distance. ;-) ]

Is it legalism to say i'm going to stand back here, or is it self-preservation? Is it folly to think that i can resist something, or is it wisdom to recognize a weakness? And lastly, with permissible things, what about the laws of Nature? If i step into a busy street, i'll probably be hit. If i step off a building gravity still applies (with messy consequences!) and even Jesus didn't throw himself off the temple. Who am i to think those laws will not apply to me, even if breaking them isn't wrong in itself? I choose the sidewalk. I may still be hit by a car but that will not be my fall. I can handle that. Escaping the messiness and pain of life is not what i expect: causing a little less of it is.

The kingdom of heaven is not come, even when God's will is our law: it is come when God's will is our will. While God's will is our law, we are but a kind of noble slaves;
when his will is our will, we are free children.
- George MacDonald

I want to be like Jesus. I want to be like him because he called me to be, because he is worth it, and because if i really believe he was a good man and a good teacher (let alone God himself) it makes absolutely no sense to not do what he said. I want to be the kind of person who is transformed from the inside by his Spirit so that i can obey. I mess up, i fall, i am not perfect, i have no expectations of being so this side of heaven but i DO believe that Jesus is not a cruel task master who gave us harder rules than Moses did without any help to meet them! I think he means for us to be transformed so that we can be more like what he said. We're to be learning citizenship just like we would in a cross-cultural setting.

"Sin is the best news there is, the best news there could be in our predicament. Because with sin, there's a way out. There's the possibility of repentance. You can't repent of confusion or psychological flaws inflicted by your parents--you're stuck with them. But you can repent of sin. Sin and repentance are the only grounds for hope and joy....You can be born again."
- John Alexander

Amen.

Botanical garden field trip

This past Friday, we went on a field trip to a huge botanical garden that specializes in California Natives. I had a heydey with photos. Unfortunately, having to learn the names of everything takes half the fun out of it--i'll remember the water needs, colors, and growth habit, and maybe one name, but it's taking the pudding out of me to remember both common name and latin name of all these suckers! Quiz on Monday!

This is a variety of Native Iris, Iris douglasiana. It's also sometimes called Douglas Iris, and comes in colors from white with yellow lines to deep indigo blue and purple. There are some cultivars that are golden and frilly: cultivars, however, tend to not be as hardy and vigourous.

Here is a golden one.

This is blue-eyed grass Sisyrinchium bellum and wild monkey flower, Mimulus sp. There are Mimulus cultivars that come in all sorts of colors with all sizes of flowers. I think this is also one:

This is Louisia. It's an alpine plant from around the timberline in the California Sierras. I have to look up the rest of the name because i misspelled it in my sketchbook. :( Edit: This is Lewisia cotyledon.

This beauty is Baccharis pilialaris 'chablis', also known as Dwarf Variegated Coyote Brush. It's a nice-sized shrub with interesting foliage, and it smells good when the leaves are crushed or if something brushes up against them.

Want to plant California natives in your garden? The Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden specializes in them and has plant sales a few times a year. Tree of Life Nursery is also a good source. I'm learning about other nurseries on a few upcoming field trips. Ask your local nursery about native plants--they attract birds and butterflies too.

I love the desert

I have to learn the names of most of these anyway, so once i have, i'll come back and label them. For now, they're here for you to enjoy, whoever you are.

I love how the new leaves are wrapped so tightly that even after they unfurl, the imprint indicating their close proximity to the other leaves remains.

It rained a while ago, so all the cacti were in bloom.

This isn't a cactus but it was blooming too.

Another blooming cactus.

Small world

One of my classmates is kind of from a country i lived in for a year for boarding school. His mother is from a town that my family went to every year up in the highlands. He recognized the name of the school in Nigeria and i recognized the name of the town in Cameroon. Weird. Kind of neat.

I guess it's not really a small world, though, because we don't know anyone in common.

Once again...

...i need more sleep.

I'm not sure what it is, this aversion to sleep, but i am convinced it will soon wreak havoc on my graduate career unless i get it under control. It makes me forgetful. It makes it nigh impossible to wake up on time to get to school with breakfast in my tummy. Make that: get to school on time with breakfast in my tummy. Or get to school on time at all. And it makes me forgetful.

We had a field trip today to the Huntington Library and Gardens and I FORGOT MY CAMERA! My precious, which i hardly know how to use because it can do everything except make dinner. It would have been helpful to have today because the gardens were in glorious spring bloom.

The (third ever in 100 years!) director gave us a death-march paced tour of the Desert Garden, Japanese Garden, and Chinese Garden because our design studio project this quarter is to brainstorm ideas for one of those. He told us some of his ideas and visions, gave us history of the estate and the individual gardens, and was a delightfully informative host. I look forward to many more (free! yay! whew!) visits to research use, topography, and come up with ideas. (And to take photos.)

The estate is intended to still feel as though it was someone's private estate. When Huntington bought it, the land was a working ranch with oranges and peaches, and the site of one of the first commercial avocado groves in California. Little of that remains, but the gardens are at a personal scale in many ways (personal if you were a multi-millionaire), and have the funky charms and idiosyncrasies of a 100-year-old private garden. Many of the cacti and succulents in the Desert Garden were collected by the Huntingtons and the first garden superintendent; the Japanese garden has elements requested by Mrs. Huntington, and the Chinese Garden is brand spanking new but only the first phase is complete--there are about 10 more acres to develop. The Japanese Garden needs renovation, not in least because a lovely old tree died this past year and everything under it needs shade which it won't have for many years, and a new bonsai court is in progress for sun-loving bonsai, and a tea garden is planned. And for the desert, which i love, most of the paths are closed to the public because of steep terrain, unstable footing, and very prickly plants with little regard for path delineation.

I haven't decided which of the three to focus on this quarter, but at the moment i'm leaning toward the desert. It isn't truly a desert garden the way the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix is, but it's a world-class collection of plants begun in the early 1900's. And, learning a lot about solitude this past year, i've become more attracted to the desert as a place of weakness as well as a place of strength. There should be places of drama where plants explode in color and texture, as well as places of subtle discovery to reward those who sit and study. The desert kills or it woos--it depends on if one insists on rushing through headlong or realizes the wisdom of yielding to forces much greater than oneself.