Flower power

This morning I took my coffee and went to drink it in front of my house, enjoying some minutes of peace and quiet before the day starting to unfold. Some weeks ago I took outside the house some geraniums, and put them on a shelf near my entrance, and today I was watching them, thinking that I might have to move them back inside, because most of them didn’t seem to enjoy the weather too much. And just when this thought crossed my mind, I suddenly noticed four tiny buds blooming at the tip of one of the flowers, which I could have easily ignored, due to their pale pink colour. And when I came closer to take a picture of them, I also saw that, beneath the layer of leaves slowly drying, a new layer of leaves was coming to light, as if the flowers, now exposed to the outside conditions, was shedding its “skin” of fragile limbs and is now putting on another one, stronger and eager to live.

I then realized that it was Wednesday, and that I hadn’t written something in a while, because I was simply caught up with loads of personal things and it took me some time to untangle them all. At some point I even felt that I was never going to get out of the multitude of threads and tasks that surrounded me – fortunately, time proved me that anything can find itself a solution, with a little bit of patience and open-mindedness.

Today, looking at those geraniums blooming against the heavy odds, I understood (for the umpteenth time) that even when circumstances seem to be the harshest, one can still adapt and keep on living. And the flower power concept (which, as a funny coincidence, was the dress code of an event which I attended on the past Sunday) suddenly attained a new valence. Nature has its silent but splendid ways of teaching us its lessons – but only if and when we’re ready to learn them :).

@ 2014 Liliana Negoi, essay and photo

LILIANA NEGOI  (Endless Journey and in Romanian curcubee în alb şi negru) ~ is a member of our core team on Into the Bardo. She is the author of three published volumes of poetry in English, which is not her mother tongue but one that she came to love especially because of writing: Sands and Shadows, Footsteps on the San – tanka collection and The Hidden Well.  The last one can also be heard in audio version, read by the author herself on her SoundCloud site HERE.  She is also the author of a novel, Solo-Chess, available for free reading HERE. Many of her creations, both poetry and prose, have been published in various literary magazines.