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Posts Tagged ‘blooming’

Let the World Have Its Way With You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 9, 2025| 12 Comments »


 
 
Today it’s the daisy that teaches me
about opening. How lovely it was last week.
I praised its yellow, sun-gold petals
reaching out as they were from the bright center.
After last night’s fierce rain, the flower has been trashed,
stripped of its petals. Every. One. Bent and bruised,
they lie splayed in the dirt. And the daisy
goes on with its growing. New leaves.
New roots. New buds. Nourished
by the rain that tore the flower apart.
How often have I, too, lost all my petals, only to learn
that was not the end of the story of opening?
This world is a world of both beauty and loss.
Did I ever really believe one opening
would last me forever? It’s always a lifetime
of learning. Today it’s so clear that when
I can bring presence to loss or resistance,
this act makes pain itself luminous,
is how the heart grows roots, and buds and leaves.
Always it returns to this—offering the broken world
my wonder. In return, oh, the opening.

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Driving Back to the Orchard Where Once We Lived

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 1, 2025| 10 Comments »


 
 
I realize I am no longer a slender sapling.
No longer a pink cherry blossom in spring.
But I am not done with my blossoming.
I am not yet done with serving
sweetness to the world.
I am so grateful for all those years
that taught me the importance
of tending to soil,
how to meet drought, how to prune,
how to thin, how to plan.
But I am no longer a sapling.
Nor am I a workhorse of a pear tree
grafted decades ago.
I aspire to be more like purple mustard,
a weed growing exuberant and thick
in the long orchard rows—
grown to suppress all other weeds,
intent on improving the dirt,
a pest control, good for tilling,
a natural biofumigant.
But most of all, there is no stopping
that deep, sweet, surprising
and beautiful scent.

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Because the Frost Is Late This Year

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 20, 2024| 16 Comments »

The nasturtiums have flourished enough
to escape their bed, and long, round
stems stretch down from the wooden
box and run between rows along the garden
paths, and it’s a freaking insurgence
of blooming, a mutiny of beauty, a
rebellion of splendor and my god if
I don’t just stand here in the paths, stunned
by the unlikely blessing, cursed with my
knowledge of how quickly it all can die, but
today, just look at it, today, I don’t even
try not to praise it, instead I stand in
the midst of improbable glory and fall
in love with all these gold and orange
petals and wide rounded leaves, barely
able to breathe past the ache of how all
we love will leave us—even the wildest
of blossomings, even the most unruly
of beauties, even what looks as if it’s
so alive it could take over the whole world.

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Spell of the Christmas Cactus

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 14, 2023| 10 Comments »

Something magic
about knowing
it’s the darkest days
that bring on the buds,
the extravagant bloom,
because oh, friend,
how dark it is.

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