~:: Flowers ::~

I wonder why we put so much stock in flowers? Just now, as the weather plays its almost cruel games of bate and switch on us, I find myself counting the small clumps of brave and early bloomers as promises.  Which they aren’t.  They’re little biological lifeforms that have no power to promise anything to anybody.  And still, when I look at them, I feel hope.

We, with all our language and art of touch, seem sometimes so short of word.  A man – perhaps penitent, or hoping to persuade—smoothing the way, or celebrating a day—will pull out a wad of these things, barely hidden by his back, and present them to his love.  Or his mother.  Or his daughter.

We send them across continents to express sympathy or joy or thanks.

Why do we do this?  Is it the color of the things?  The delicate, complex structure of them?  The scent?  Or maybe simply an ephemeral beauty that matches the fleeting nature of our joys and sorrows?

Whatever the magic, flowers seem to encapsulate for us meanings we are unable to make manifest in any other way.  And they appear at our most mysterious times: love, birth, death.

A token.  From one hand to another.

I am with you in this.

I remember.

Here is love you can close your fingers around.  That you can breathe in.

When did something as fragile as a flower come to signify an infusion of courage?

But that is what the gift seems to mean, beauty forcing its way from the depths of the hard earth, reflecting the light as startlingly as any other thing under the sun could.

A gift of love from the very beginning of things?

I must admit—I suspect that’s exactly what it all comes down to.