[Garden Memories: XXIV]
Only after I moved away from my childhood home in California I realized there was such a thing as “autumn colors” in other parts of the Unites States. And people traveled to observe them. And photographers prioritizes capturing them. And states debate whose colors are most spectacular.
I wasn’t unaware of the rainbow colored foliage because I was geographically ignorant, in the way someone might be that never ventured beyond the moderate climate of the California coastline or never left the season-less Central Valley. I wasn’t unaware because it was unfamiliar; I was blind to it because it was too familiar.
Our home was landscaped in fast-growing Liquidambars, also known as Sweet Gum trees. Notorious for dropping spiky balls every fall, they grow to nearly 70 feet and put on a foliage fireworks show when the weather cooled at the end of summer. Annually our property swam in “autumn colors,” every tree varying from electric yellow to neon orange to blood red.
My normal was relative to our small plot of land: every year was an arboreal light show. It was what I knew, but it was abnormal by California standards. Not more or less true; not better or worse. Just different. (And gorgeous!)
Our blind spots aren’t the result of not knowing but often the result of knowing with full certainty only a portion of the larger reality. While it might align with others elsewhere, we may be alienated from those close to us because we’re assuming they too share in our assumptions and experience.
Larger reality—Divine Reality—is always bigger and more diverse than the “property” you live on.
