Does a flower feel that it’s gone too far? *
I have lived a long time and therefore I have witnessed the blooming of many flowers. In fact, I have even lived across the road from a botanical garden, with a wide variety of flowers as neighbors. What I can tell you is that they bloom through thick and thin, in urban environments, pastoral settings, in peacetime, and in war. I have even heard of flowers surviving in vases that belong to generals who have tortured their own citizens.
But let us now consider more than Middle Eastern lilies.
Let us also consider Vermont snowdrops flowering in snow.
Let us also consider Connecticut daffodils pushing up through frozen ground.
Let us also consider New York dandelions in sidewalk cracks.
And let us consider the geraniums in all those contested no-man lands.
They are more glorious than any king’s finery. And yet they have not gone too far. In fact, I’d encourage flowers to go further.
Flowers know that despite the desire of humans to control them, they will always be responsible for their own existence. They will never surrender to ownership by homo sapiens (who put limits on their own flowering).
And besides, where exactly is the spot on the map that is called Too Far?
* From a Maine gardener
Then go further, flower! (“Where exactly is the spot on [your] map that is called Too Far?”)
I think it’s so lovely the way you highlight flowers’ inconquerable blooming; and also I think of Faust – when Plutus’s charioteer (Profusion – “the soul of Poesy”) says
The greatest gifts my hand has to bestow
Are scattered left and right in lavish share.
Behold, on many a head the tiny glow,
The spurt of flame that I have kindled there.
From brow to brow the lambent flashing springs,
Eluding most, thought here and there it clings;
But rarely does the tongue of flame leap higher,
To bear a token like a flower of fire.
With many, ere they recognize the spark,
It burns away, and all is sad and dark. (Part II, 57)
Let us never “surrender ownership to homo sapiens.”
Thanks, A. Don’t you think that “Let us never surrender ownership to homo sapiens” should be a bumper sticker or the beginning to an alternative ‘lifestyle’?
Yes, Elena, I do. It should be a bumper sticker, an alternative lifestyle, and the title of a self-help book in 12 steps/chapters with a costume included