Imagine life without them. Their petal hearts bursting forth, impossibly delicate tiny golden barbells of stamen, purple filament fine as baby hair. The tri-petaled joy of spiderwort, the nectar of an apricot rose, the brassy trumpet of the stargazer lily, the stout trajectory of the amaryllis, the fragrant bell of the lily of the valley calling the passerby to prayer. A palette of colors heretofore unknown. According to one source, flowering plants and honeybees co-evolved sixty-five million years ago though fossils show flower-like structures as far back as 130 million years.
Flowers, perhaps more than anything else, speak of beauty and mortality in the same breath.
Last fall I planted twelve bearded iris along with other smaller varieties. Toward May’s end one white and periwinkle blossom appeared, so breathtaking I cut it and brought it inside. Within two days, the petals wilted. The next week, a bronzely purple bloom arose as if it alone could save the earth. It too melted in all its glory, weeping great purple tears onto the coffee table as if the Buddha himself had sent iris to remind us of life’s impermanence.
Ah, but the iris will bloom next year. Perennials, the great emissaries of hope that teach us not to fear the fertile dark but to praise it.
We grow flowers to imitate the earth which thought of it already, decorating hillsides and meadows with bluebonnets and cosmos, lupines and larkspur, foxglove and morning glory. We give flowers to whisper life into deadened spaces, to celebrate accomplishment as if the splendor of our achievements might compare to the splendor of theirs. We paint and photograph, sculpt and weave flowers into the fabric of our daily being though already they insinuate themselves there. Flowers always bloom in the garden of our lives, becoming part of our stories.
Sometimes it is not the flowers themselves that appear, but we appear as flowers. When I think of the weeping iris, resplendent still in its beauty as diminishment sets in, I go back ten summers ago, as a hospital chaplain as part of my ministerial training. I meet man in his eighties I’ll call Mr. Goldberg on the renal unit, lying vertically across the horizontal length of his bed, in a johnny and diapers. He lets me feed him canned peaches that slide from the spoon.
He finishes the slippery peaches.
“What matters?” I ask as the TV overhead flickers a blue-green backdrop from the fishing channel.
“I’m waiting for you to get naked and see how the other half lives,” he replies.
“That may be the best offer I get,” I tell him, “but my supervisor would probably get upset if I take off my clothes.”
“What, is he a chaplain?” Mr. Goldberg asks. I nod that he is.
I offer to pray with him and apologize for not knowing Hebrew. He shrugs and lets me hold his hand. Softly, I form the words close to his ear, my eyes shut. A short caravan of syllables later, he interrupts to compliment my navy blue blazer.
Mary Oliver writes:
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and stems and the flowers
began. 1
He sputters like a candle swallowing its wick, like an iris melting into indigo tears.
“You, with broad shoulders,” he says. “Me, with nothing.” I don’t let go of his hand.
Perhaps more than other question I wonder if we were to come back as a flower what flower would you, would I be? What flower speaks of your life in this moment? Are you growing wild beside a noisy road or deep in the forest amid the tender moss that swaddles trees? Are you part of a riotous bouquet of color or do you stand muted and solitary? Take a moment to consider your flower self now and how you would choose to return. Might you come back as an eager daffodil announcing yourself yellowingly bold? Would you choose the dignified crimson dahlia or the impetuous peony? Share if you will with someone seated near you, your current flower self and what flower you would choose to inhabit? And what flower do you see the person next to you?
In her poem, “Daisies,” Mary Oliver writes:
It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. …
At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their—if you don't
mind my saying so—their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example—I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch—
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field. 2
It is useful to ponder suitability especially those times in life when either the field feels unsuitable for growth or we feel mismatched to the field.
The same summer I spoke of ten years ago I encountered a boy not unlike the “white-petalled daisies,” his heart a small yellow silent sun. John had no words at least that he could speak. His chart made no explanation beside the notation “nonverbal.” Each day for a month I would visit him, alone in the hospital at seven, his father working and living four hours away rarely able to come. Mother out of the picture. John with his renal pump stitched inside his belly, glanced at but rarely seen like daisies in a field that appear prosaic, endless iterations of themselves.
One day I find John in the playroom, seated at the computer staring at the screen. “John” I say, “would you be willing to come color with me?” I shall always cherish the moment he draws his small finger with its dirty nail to the power button and turns the computer off. His silent gesture of generosity the most glorious bloom.
Who is to say whether the field that holds John suits him now, but his quiet flowering in a single moment resides with me still.
Again, from Mary Oliver:
Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse
of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there
in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language
some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?
Vigen Guroian a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia writes:
I’m walking in my garden and all of a sudden, overnight, something has bloomed, maybe the honeysuckle, maybe the rugosa roses… And I don’t even see it, but I know it’s present. I feel its presence. No, I smell its presence. I’m aware of it. For many of us, that’s an experience like that of experiencing God in prayer.
Pithily he says, “Gardening grows from our deep longing for salvation, so that beauty fills our lives.”3
I recall the women I met in Cuernavaca, Mexico, struggling in abject poverty to survive, who grow flowers in discarded coffee cans so that their lives too, will have beauty, who give their North American visitors roses from the bunches they sell to make enough money to eat for a day.
Flowers give us beauty but more, they give us the gift of sharing that beauty, of giving it again. In that spirit of generosity we partake in the flower service created in 1923 by Norbert Capek, founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. Dr. Capek sought to bring people into communion with life’s beauty, with the earth’s grandeur, with the flower nature within ourselves. So as Molly and I come to you with flowers, I ask that you each take one and notice its uniqueness, the beauty it offers at whatever stage of life it’s in. Notice too how it speaks to you and of you— once everyone has a flower while Robin plays, I ask you to give the flower to someone else, reverently, gladly: with words or in silence, allow yourself to be part of the gift the earth gives us in what flowers.
Closing words: In the voice of an old man, in the singular movement of a silent child, in the trumpeting bloom and the weeping surrender of petals may we inhabit life’s momentary beauty. I leave you with Mary Oliver’s poem, “Poppies.”
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night? 4
---
1 From the poem “White Flowers,” New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press
2 from “Daisies,” published in Why I Wake Early , Mary Oliver, Beacon Press
3 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/restoringthesenses/transcript.shtml
4 Published in New and Selected Poems and in Blue Iris, Beacon Press
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman, First Parish Fitchburg UU, June 2010
