I was trying to think of something to draw or do for this blog.  A while ago I’d taken a picture of clover weeds with the idea that I’d make a small painting, but I thought I could do better.  Maybe I’d go to a café and sketch something or just think of something else.  Days passed, and inspiration had not struck.  The heat index was regularly in the 100s, and that didn’t make me want to sketch at a café or hit the streets.  A couple more days passed, and I bemoaned my lack of ideas.  But then I remembered that I did have an idea and had had an idea all along—the clover painting.  All I had to do was accept it.  So I did.

Does this kind of thing ever happen to you?  I’ve taught and practiced freewriting long enough to know the power of first thoughts, yet I still fall into psyching myself out sometimes, insisting on some theoretical better thing, instead of just saying yes to what’s at hand.

Clover.  It represents summer and childhood, minutes meditating the way children do—with such intense interest and rapt attention, like falling down a rabbit hole, totally absorbed.  I long for such intent looking.  That’s why I love travel.  We get our child sense back through the strangeness of things.  I picture myself, maybe six, squatting in the world of a suburban driveway, pondering a fissure in the asphalt where the prairie of a prior century showed through.  Big brother clover, expert on the way things are here, tell me what you know of storms and earthworms, sneakers and basketballs, dandelions, ants, and the lilies’ white bells, of inhabiting margins and claiming a place, of the right to exist, a calling into summer, a sprawling meekness, marvelousness, symmetry and pattern, subtlety, delicateness, of the touch of tiny fingers.