Hello, dear readers.
This week’s writing prompt is offered in response to all the flowers in bloom during this season. For years I’ve brought flowers to my writing groups, passed them around the circle, and asked everyone to interact with each blossom as an individual object. We take time to smell the flowers, hold them up to the light, twirl them between our fingers. Some of us take notes: then we write. This prompt encourages us to explore how flowers bring up memories, images, and stories of sex, love, death, romance, apologies, and of course, reproduction. These themes often lead to some very emotionally rich writing. And since I can’t pass flowers to you through the screen, I offer them to you virtually, in the video below.
But first, this week’s quote, by artist Georgia O’Keefe:
Nobody sees a flower , really— it is so small, it takes time—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like having a friend takes time.
The Prompt:
Take some time to write in response to the video above, and enjoy the power of the time-lapse photography of flowers blooming. After watching the video, write for twenty minutes, anything that comes to mind.
What I wrote is below, followed by the poem, “The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts,” by Mary Oliver (from her collection, Thirst).
What I wrote in response:
I've been lucky. Nearly all of the places I've lived as an adult have had an outdoor space. My current deck isn't the quietest; traffic rolls by noisily on Burnett Ave, people often scream at the nearby bus stop, and my neighbors seem to enjoy chatting on their cellphones loud enough for the whole world to hear. Still. I have times in the morning when everything is quiet, except for birdsong, when I can sit at my little table and drink my tea, and read or write for a while. I am sometimes visited by hummingbirds, and the occasional ornery scrub jay who likes to hide circus peanuts in my plants for another day.
"You live in Twin Peaks?" people sometimes say. "Oh, it's nice up there." The cynic in me wants to tell them about the endless rows of identical apartment buildings from a big development in 1969, the crappy aluminum windows, the fog, the wind. But I think they're talking about being up high, and being surrounded by so much nature. There are a lot of creatures up here, and wildflowers bloom most of the spring and summer.
Even so, I sometimes still long for a garden. Whenever I had one, I always worried about it; rarely did I end a day of pruning and planting and simply sit and take in my creation. But there was always something satisfying about opening the drapes, or walking someone to a small table outside, and knowing that what was growing was growing there because I had planted it. "Anyone with a green thumb is a witch," my friend Sam used to say. He was Wicca personified. I laughed, but I think I understood the magic he was talking about. You only have to grow sunflowers from seeds—those giant stalks and huge golden faces—to know what it feels like to give birth to something beautiful. Or a lemon tree that finally takes root, a lilac bush that is so fragrant you can smell it when you open the kitchen window.
When my friend Nina died, everything around her house started to bloom. The jasmine near her front door that was always scraggly and small, the camellias that were often fussy about blossoming in January, even the tree draped over her driveway burst with tiny white flowers that smelled like honeysuckle. I had visited her at that house for 20 years and never remember that tree blooming. "Please don't bring me cut flowers so I can watch them die," she often said. "Bring me a flowering plant I can put in the ground. Something that will live on after I am gone."
The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts
by Mary Oliver
For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer
every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose,
in its own exotic fragrance,
in its huge willingness to give
something, from its small self,
to the entirety of the world.
I think of them, thousands upon thousands,
in many lands,
whenever summer came to them,
rising
out of the patience of patience,
to leaf and bud and look up
into the blue sky
or, with thanks,
into the rain
that would feed
their thirsty roots
latched into the earth—
sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,
what did it matter,
the answer was simply to rise
in joyfulness, all their days.
Have I found any better teaching?
Not ever, not yet.
Last week I saw my first Botticelli
and almost fainted,
and if I could I would paint like that
but am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs
about roses: teachers, also, of the ways
toward thanks, and praise.
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