JACARANDAS

     I first came to Los Angeles in the summer, so it wasn't until the following May and June that I first saw the jacarandas bloom. It was stunning. The color, that delicate lavender on delicate blooms, a gorgeous simultaneous flowering all over the city. I hadn't noticed the trees themselves but now they were everywhere - an approachable, not impossible to think of climbing up into any one of them and resting back, surrounded by lavender clouds, not floating up but clouds drifting down toward the ground, a famous purple rain, to cover the ground as if the trunk of the tree was anchored on a doily of color.
     One early June, high up in an office building in Beverly Hills, I looked out and there were patches of lavender all over the city, as far as I could see. A delicate color making a powerful impact, uniting a landscape carved up by us into arbitrary areas to which we give names, labels of individuality, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails: this place is better than that, my place is better than yours. But the jacarandas are indifferent to those labels and for their weeks of bloom, they make a single landscape, stand as a metaphor for the delicate, even fragile, context that overrides antagonisms and makes us all part of same living universe.
     Over the years, the blooming jacarandas, enhanced by the simultaneous blooming of the equally lavender agapanthus, have had many meanings for me.  Of course, they've been about renewal, fresh starts, and also a more cerebral occasion to contemplate what we mean by "beauty," how we define it and give it meaning. This year, they're about the comfort of continuity, about natural cycles, the eternal return to an eternal beginning. I'm filled with the knowledge they will be here long after I'm gone, that I'm living my life in a span of time that is only a brief moment in their much larger story. I am a small but necessary, even crucial, link in the chain, and that feels right. To see so clearly that I'm part of something larger than myself makes me right-sized, anchors me to the deepest context in which we live.  
     Look around, at whatever you mean when you say, "Los Angeles." Chances are you see only change, and possibly not for the better. But call me naive, blinded by much too lavender-tinted glass: if the jacarandas are here, it will be all right.