FLOWER ROOTS AND STONES

Take a drive up the coast on 101 and check out the basalt cliffs. If there is a little soil in a crack a bit of green can be seen. Drive east throught the gorge. Where there is a crack a bit of green will find a foothold. As the trees give way to scrub watch where the hills fold into each other. Any place the rain manages to trickle through. That's where you will find low shrubs, scrubby trees with delusions of grandeur.

Basalt is a strange rock. If it cools properly it forms six sided colums. And, as road builders have found to their dismay, rain and ice and roots do their work over time. Drive sections of 101 and the columns are sheathed in chicken wire. Helps to cut down on rock slides. Heck, drive Franklin Blvd. betwen Springfield and Eugene you will see the same thing. Chicken wire sheathing the basalt columns to try to prevent rock slides. Creation is slow and patient and we mess around at our peril. Or added expense in road upkeep, delays, and detours.

Looking at my Street Atlas. If 101 between Florence and Newport in Oregon is blocked by a slide there is a network of mainly county roads that will get you from here to there. They are twisty and not built for truck traffic. We are talking coast range here. It's a little better further north but we're still talking major detours when the main route is blocked. Man plans and Creation sits back and says "good luck with that folks."

THE FLOWER THAT SHATTERED THE STONE

The Earth is our mother just turning around
With the trees in the forest and roots underground
Our father above us whose sigh is the wind
Paint us a rainbow without any end

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Sparrows find freedom beholding the sun
In the infinite beauty we're all joined in one
I reach out before me and look to the sky
Did I hear someone whisper? Did something pass by?

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Words and Music by Joe Henry and John Jarvis

Or slowly turned it into gravel.