Hello Reader! You have stumbled upon the first entry in a new series of shorter posts to my blog that I am calling my Summer Shorts. In this series I will be regularly posting shorter stories, thoughts, concepts, poems, et cetera under this new subset of Holding The Universe Together. This may or may not detract from my somewhat regularly posted pieces that fall into different categories. We’ll have to find that out together. I hope you enjoy.

While walking along a sidewalk near a church, I spotted a particularly lovely flower. It stood out from its bush vibrantly yellow, with short, flat petals and about a thousand stamen (thank you 8th grade science) that gave it an almost dandelion, orb quality. It was, for lack of a better word, beautiful.

So much so that I stopped to admire it. During this admiration time I debated breaking it from it’s stem and taking it home for my girlfriend. She likes flowers and she might appreciate this one. I also thought that the church wouldn’t mind if I took their flower because church-going folk are a generous people.

I hadn’t yet leaned down to decapitate the plant when I had a new, revolutionary thought.

Why should I take this flower home and give it to one person, whom I do love, to enjoy its beauty when I could leave it here for a lot of people to enjoy even if my loved person never gets to see it?

I answered that question with an action. I turned and walked on along my path. Then I stopped about forty feet away to write this on my phone in the glaring sun.

I was in a hurry to jot this down before I forgot the feeling of having left something beautiful in the world to share with strangers rather than kill it for a loved one.