Spirituality: “Bees among the Clover” by Margaret Silf

I wonder why I have never noticed this clover before. Today the brilliance of its full pink flowers leaps out to greet me and I almost want to apologize for the countless times I must have walked past without noticing. It is just a corner of a derelict land squeezed between the train station, the highway, and the desolate side street that leads to my place of work.

A building must have stood here once, because this land is strewn with broken bricks and lumps of concrete and rotting plaster. Perhaps, years ago, a home stood here. People lived and died, worked and laughed and struggled here and left a pile of rubble when they moved on. That must have been a long time ago, because the rough grass has taken hold of the sharp edges, and the groundsel and chickweed entangle their yellowness with the deep pensive pinks of the clover.

Times or dereliction scar most lives, and sometimes it seems that we are lying in a bed of rubble, where familiar structures of denial and defense have been demolished and crumbled into dust – and where something new might be seeded and take root.

Today an early bee hovers over the clover. There will be sweetness out of destruction. It might take years, but there will be sweetness.


Source: Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn, pp. 145-146, slightly adapted.