Cattails: Part 2

Dear Little Water Nymph,

My greatest memory of cattails from my youth was that if you were looking for frogs or garter snakes that moved through the swamps near my parents house, you could usually see a beautiful redwinged blackbird perched on a cattail.

That's how I remember cattails, as perches for redwing blackbirds.

But it wasn't until I began driving into Michigan last week that I wondered: Why cattails?

Oh, I'm sure there is some scientific story that will explain how cattails fit into the ecosystem, how redwing blackbirds help disperse the white puffy seeds that these brown cattails become. But this "why" is different: it's more like what that German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, talked about when he talked about "Dasein", "Being in the World".

I was born into a world of cattails and for many years of my life, I never really noticed them. I thought they were interesting when I saw them included in floral arrangements (which is really about taking one thing and artistically putting it in another setting).

Driving back into Michigan, I suddenly realized how immersed in cattails my youth had been and how, having moved to a big city, I no longer live in a world of cattails. (Technically, I do (I haven't left the planet!); but existentially, they don't line the road of the route I take to work.) What do they mean to me? I wonder as I drive past hundreds, hundreds of thousands of them.

From one perspective, what is there to get excited about. What's so that remarkable about cattails? Why was a feeling a certain pang of nostalgia? Is it possible in some weird way, I've been missing cattails?

I pulled off of the road as cars and semis roared by to stand in the swampy, soggy ground just off the expressway to snap these photos for you and while I've isolated one or two in the photos, they're really not that startling: pretty much the same shade of brown, the same sausage shape.

Living in this country, we spent a great deal of time talking about what makes us SPECIAL. Sadly, it is how we place a value on things. We tell ourselves that we give movie stars more money when they are more talented. We tell ourselves that we pay more money for paintings done by "better artists". But this money that we pay is more about what all the cattails agree is of greater collective value.

Your mother and I plan on showing you just how unique you are, how wonderfully talented you are. And you are, you will be.

But I don't want you to only value those things that make you different, I want you to see the cattails too because those are the things that later, as you grow older will surprise you with how FULL your world is!

I want you to imagine yourself a redwinged blackbird, perched on a cattail singing about the beauty of the world. If you're lucky, a breeze may come up and move those cattails and make them look like they're nodding their heads or rustling the dry stalks that sound like applause.

But if there is no breeze, I still want you to celebrate cattails, coz that's what we do as humans, celebrate   and sing the praises of this God-given creation. We're born to praise and pray.

Someday I hope to take you out to the edge of a lake and scan a whole field of cattails. We'll look for redwing blackbirds too. And if we don't see one (a redwinged blackbird, I mean), let's sing about cattails together, shall we?