Flowers and foliage
Though minimal progress toward the arrival of springtime occurred through the entire month of March, in April, spring exploded in a few days. Following the cold three days ago, buds long dormant during March’s freezing temperatures blossomed. Translucent juvenile foliage uncurled along stems and branches. Birds began endless song, insects began the work of pollination, butterflies began fluttering about, and snakes began sunning in open patches. I am again grateful that my northward progression will dramatically extend the springtime.
Each day, it seems I walk through the spring transition four times because the amount of foliage and flowers is a strong function of elevation.
Out here, it feels like spring
Because an extended spring will coincide with essentially my entire trail journey, I am blessed with extra time to reflect on hope of spring. Hope blooms in each flower if you are willing to sit down and marvel at its exquisite detail. Hope emerges with each leaf that imbues a bleak landscape with a splotch of vibrant color. So I have also been listening to speeches that communicate a message of hope, filling my thoughts with an optimism rooted in the good that has happened and is happening in the world. This is so much easier now that I spend more time with flowers and less time with angry news and social media.
One of the speeches that’s impressed me deeply is then-President Obama‘s January 2010 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial sermon preached at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church. Though delivered to a particular audience for a peculiar moment, like any great oratory, a timeless relevance fills its ideas. Two optimistic points strike me from the speech. The first regards perspective. Anytime we achieve some amount of progress, some will react with disappointment, saying it is not enough. Others celebrate and push for more. Obama urged the latter: “Even if we don’t get everything, were getting something,” he encouraged.
The second concerns the United States. Our diversity, values, history, legislation, and the government of law in this country are incredible. Incredible means not perfect but a spectacular inheritance that we can use for the purposes of greater refinement. Despite pervasive cynicism in his time and ours, Obama truly believed that “government aligned with the interests of it’s people can be and must be a force for good.”
I have also been listening to Alexis DeToqueville’s classic Democracy in America. This incredible 1830s book, written by a Frenchman who spent over a decade in the young United States to gather insight on our Republic, conveys an awe lacking in my 21st century American experience at the history and purpose of the American people and government. It communicates that the blessing of an organized system to govern a pluralistic society, which I inherited, did not come for free. The ideals and responsibilities underpinning our society must, in each generation, be upheld and advanced. These ideals include equality, justice, liberty, inclusion, civil rights, honesty, and service.
A common theme from de Toqueville and Obama is this: “our version of democracy is hard” (quoting Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address). Our founders wisely created a complicated system of checks and balances to guard against unchecked power. Our federal system allocates duties to governments at the municipal, county, state, and national levels. De Tocqueville argues this is a beautiful system that claims the benefits of increased liberty from local government and of increased strength and stability from large government. It can also be unwieldy and slow. The system relies on a good-spirited people who, taken as a whole, strive not to game the system but to build it up.
Never is it easier for me to believe that our nation is full of good-spirited people than on trail. Among hikers and the community supporting hikers, people are generous, kind, independent, but driven by shared interest. They seek not to maximize what they can amass for themselves but to learn, challenge themselves, and care for each other. This social fabric exists at the heart of what I believe this country is built on. No doubt the news that I’m not reading anymore is filled with negativity, smearing, and pettiness. Out here, it feels like spring.
Listening to de Tocqueville and Obama’s words, meeting people, I feel an optimism about country, climate, and future rooted in fact and experience, not in blind trust or fairytale. At the end of Obama’s 2016 State of the Union, he asserted “It’s a lot easier to be cynical, to accept that change is impossible and politics is hopeless…. [But] the America I know [is] clear-eyed, big hearted, optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Perhaps this sentiment is now unpopular because it feels removed from reality or impractical to achieve anything. Maybe so. All I can say is that, as spring emerges around me, as I share in conversation with Americans from acorss the nation, these words, this reminder speaks clearly and truly to me. Out here, it feels like spring.
[…] and on America, so I must give Rover substantial credit for shaping the perspective I shared in yesterday’s post. She’s extremely smart and has a mature self-awareness about how hard to push her […]