flowers – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

Several years back when living in London, we went on a February holiday. When we returned a week later, we opened the door on the stone wall to find a yard filled with blossoms. What we previously thought was a scraggly, scrappy bit of lawn was actually a field of saffron crocus that hadn’t yet bloomed. What an astonishing sight! It felt truly magical, as if we had been visited by fairies. How wonderful to learn how wrong we’d been about the judgment we made of that lawn. Something much more extravagantly delightful was given us instead in spite of our misconception.

The crocus were followed by a parade of other flowers. In Regents Park aged cherry trees ballooned sprays of white flowers, and along our urban neighborhood streets cherry trees lifted tender pink cheeks, street lamps illuminating sprays of flowers as if trying to enter a painting. Except for a few months of the year, flowers seemed to be everywhere in London, sending out their gentle greetings to whoever passed by. Flowers are such inclusive, generous folk, who seem to think everyone needs a bit of beauty in their lives, and they give it freely.

London’s cherry blossoms turned into daffodils crowding walkways in Regents Park along paths, and clearings. Blossoms are the dreams of trees and plants, the result of winter’s cold work, the absence of sun, the ongoing unseen, quiet effort of renewal. Whether by the sweat of the brow, the effort of the brain or the liquid pressure inside cells at the base of waiting blossoms, everything that blooms does so with effort. Li-Young Lee, in his poem, “From Blossoms”, describes peaches he eats as a child, fruit picked from bended bows, and ladened with dust. Eating the peach he savors the flavor, the orchard it came from, and the shade he sat in as he eats the fruit.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Flowers lift our hearts and delight our spirits. Spring after spring, the blossoms return. Like plants that need certain nutrients to bloom, humans. too, need nurturing for their lives to flower. There is not just one spring in a life, though, not just one season to bloom. On our property here in California we have a peach tree. The tree is ailing and we’re not sure how to help it. Bent and lichen covered with barely a trunk to stand on, every year we think it’s bound to die. But every year it blossoms. Every year the sweetest buds break forth.

I have a pair of slippers with blossoms on the soles. When I walk in them, I think of how they leave an invisible imprint of flowers where my feet move across the floor–blossoms with every footprint. I wish to live in the way that Thich Nhat Hahn states when he writes, “The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.”

In a world waiting for spring, longing for renewal and beauty to rise, walking across the world with the intention of leaving behind a trail of blossoms for those along the way is something worth living for, something worth doing. The Navajo prayer says it well,

Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With dew about my feet, may I walk.
With beauty before me may I walk.
With beauty behind me may I walk.
With beauty below me may I walk.
With beauty above me may I walk.
With beauty all around me may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
My words will be beautiful…

May our presence and our words be a door for others opening into a garden filled with the gentleness of flowers.

20190301_152744 (1) Rain has fallen relentlessly the past few months in Santa Cruz County, but today a break occurred allowing the sun to come out, and I emerged into my backyard’s delicious light. Looking up at the billowing clouds, I rested in the afternoon’s quietness, reveled in the creek’s soft rumpling as it moved through the redwoods down the road. Ill with a cold, I had no plans but to take in the day. “The Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man,” writes Abraham Joshua Heschel. “God is not in things of space, but in moments of time.” Time is a temple, an experience to savor and relish. Today I felt enfolded in this truth.

On a recent trip to Hawaii, my husband and I connected with friends–walking, sitting, absorbing life. We arrived without any set plans. We simply wanted to be present with our friends and the world they inhabit. While there, we ventured out into the landscape, absorbing its fabulous diversity. Hawaii is a world different from where I live, and the difference is a delight.

Traditional Hawaiian society had defined roles for men and women. In traditional Hawaiian society, men cooked and farmed while women made art. Women and men ate in different locations, and inheritance was through matriarchal lines. Additionally, Hawaiians held an awareness of the mahu, those who identified themselves with both genders–someone in the middle.

In Hawaiian traditional culture, the idea of family goes back several generations. The physical family was part of the spiritual, timeless family. As depicted in the photo of the stone shrine above, Hawaiians honored family ancestors.

Traditional ways of thinking have eroded since the arrival of Westerners to the island, however. Because Hawaiians have highly adapted to Western culture and its way of thinking, restoring traditional ways is highly problematic. Nevertheless, learning something of Hawaiian’s traditional ways of organizing society helps me to view my own culture newly, to consider anew my relationship with family and friends, and to enter into an awareness of our spiritual connection.

Though I know little about my ancestors or their history, like members of traditional Hawaiian culture, I’m attracted to the idea of timeless connection beyond our physical bodies to the lives of those who came before us.

To understand a culture not your own takes attentive, receptive study over time. Though people may not be able to restore what was lost in the multitude of cultures that make up the world we now live in, we can listen attentively to voices other than our own and find ways we might move toward greater restitution with those around us. We don’t have to agree with everyone to value them, to give them love. We may not have answers or solutions for the hurt people and cultures have endured. Nevertheless, we can build bridges of beauty that can unite us in larger fields of compassion so we can enter into a place of being together.

One way I’ve begun this effort is by planting in my garden favorite flowers for family members and friends–iris, poppies, sunflowers, dahlias and more. Though there are differences of values and perspectives with family members, looking out at the flowers growing and blossoming in the garden, I can notice life unfolding in its various forms, connecting the flower to the person who chose it–a living reminder of the many and varied lives linked to mine.

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up,” says Maya Angelou, “… our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.” Flowers touch the tender place in all of us where we are “shy as magnolias,” as Angelou describes. In the garden we can be alive together, planted in earth, recognizing our short lives and vulnerability as we take in the sun and rain. Without measuring one flower against the other, we can be together. Sometimes simply inhabiting time with one another, opening ourselves to its color can be enough.

Tag: flowers

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