Garth George: Nature shows one size doesn't fit all

Spring is a magic time of the year - time for new beginnings - and looking around at the beauty of nature and knowing how lucky we are.

It is significant, I reckon, that just as spring has sprung, as it does on September 1 every year, I am beginning to feel more alive.

I have been told by the respiratory specialist at Rotorua Hospital, in whom I have complete confidence, that the latest CT scan shows that the months of chemotherapy and weeks of radiation treatment I suffered through summer, autumn and winter have succeeded better than expected in knocking back the cancers in my right lung.

And I surely did suffer. Three months after my last treatment, I am still short of breath, chronically tired and my tastebuds remain all to hell. But I have been assured by a fellow Probus member, who has been through the same mill, that in another three months or so I won't know myself.

That fills me with optimism.

Thus I have decided that I will consider spring, which is beginning to transform our environment, a new beginning for me - or at least a resumption of life as I knew it before my cancer diagnosis a year ago.

I note, as Winnie the Pooh put it, that as spring is sprung, the grass is riz. But there's no need to wonder where the birdies is. They're where they ought to be - sitting on their nests and keeping their eggs warm.

I know that because there aren't nearly as many of them waiting on the roofs opposite our unit to demolish in a matter of minutes the stale bread or cake my wife and I feed to them nearly every winter's morning.

I am, of course, delighted that grass can grow as fast as it likes these days and I don't have to concern myself with it. That's one of the great benefits of living in a lifestyle village - all outside work is done for us as part of our monthly service charge. And it's worth every penny.

Spring is a magic time of the year, particularly in Rotorua. All around this leafy city, hundreds of flowering trees of all shapes and sizes are already blossoming, hundreds of deciduous ones have sprung into leaf, and hundreds of evergreens are putting forth new growth.

Yet we can look forward, as spring really takes hold, to an even more amazing riot of colour as those trees and plants which are yet to bud are one day bare, the next day bringing forth their blossoms and their leaves.

As I look around I am awed once again by the infinite variety of God's wonderful creation: every tree its own unique green; every leaf its own unique shape; every flower its own unique colour and scent. Even the varieties of roses, which will begin to bloom anytime now, each smell subtly different.

And I'm reminded that when he created us humans, God made us all infinitely varied and each unique, too. Not one of us has the same fingerprints, not one the same timbre to the voice. Even identical twins are discernible to their parents and siblings.

On the outside, we all vary in height, weight and shape; our eyes and our hair are all different colours; our faces, by which we recognise one another, are never the same.

Inside we're all just as varied: we have different tastes, ambitions, interests, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, differing beliefs, different habits - the list could go on and on.

In the world of plants and trees, God's fascinating creation makes a wondrous, unified whole. Rarely - at least in New Zealand - does any tree or plant strike a discordant note among those around it.

I think he meant humans to be like that, too. So let's do away with uniformity - and the one-size-fits-all mentality.

garth.george@hotmail.com