Beauty in What Remains

Two weeks after I brought home a bouquet of alstroemeria flowers I am reveling in the…

Beauty of What Remains

The flowers are beginning to loose their petals. Some stems have only leaves and the base of the flower blossoms remaining on them. Still, I find them beautiful.

Our experience of flowers is so deeply drenched in our sense of time. Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future — complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time.

   — Michael Pollen, The Botony of Desire

Perhaps it is the transitory beauty of flowers that draws me, or the soft sweet scents they emit. Whatever it is, they enchant me through all stages of their lives, even as they are fading and dying. The passing of flowers marks the passage of time and reminds me of my own mortality.

I have no desire to live forever. But I do want to live my days fully alive and aware while I’m here. I want to exclaim at the exquisite beauty and wonder of life and nature. And I want to feel every feeling I experience, even the bitter or difficult ones. One cannot choose to feel only the sweet and beautiful. To numb out pain is to also to numb out the joy of life.

“nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

So here’s to the beauty and wonder of it all, even what remains when life is fading or challenging.

May you walk in beauty.

And here’s Gracie on her new squirrel and bird watching platform that Jon made for her today. From this window in the bedroom next to my office she can see the squirrels on the ground below my office window as well as the birds at the feeder.