Bright Blooms
I went for a walk with my mom in the cemetery last weekend - not because we have anyone buried there (because we don’t) but because it’s one of the lushest places in town, filled with wide paths and huge, sheltering shade trees that block the worst of the sun’s radiant heat. The whole place smells GREEN, the scent rising and growing all around you with every step (and if you’re not sure that green has a smell, I assure you it does - after a year on the dusty and sun-dried prairie, I can smell that hue from a mile away). It’s also quiet, uncrowded, and peaceful in a way that so many places can only aspire to be.
Maybe, still, you’re thinking - what a strange place to go for a stroll! So let me add one more detail to the WHY of it all : peonies.
In late spring, the whole place explodes in shades of pink. Almost every headstone has something lovely planted alongside, but the peonies steal the show. They glow and dance and flounce about so marvelously that you can’t help but imagine the souls resting there are content. There’s just so much life in those showy flowers, I can’t stay away!
I have great ambition
To be less serious -
Less confined by the box of pure practicality
That my logical self holds to so firmly
While my intuition reaches inevitably, but less forcefully, opposite.
I aspire to the level of peony.
Head asks - what’s the need for all those petals?
Layer upon layer of frivolity unfolding
To catch both soft light and jewels of dew that will only disappear
In the rising day, blooms so heavy beneath the weight of that joyful excess
That stems must bow to meet the earth.
What’s the point, the reason,
The why?
And heart answers, softly,
Does there always need to be a reason?
Isn’t it simply enough to just BE
In whatever form feels most like home?
