Alexandersmap

    Tag: Daffodils

    • Mining for Gold

      “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need” — Cicero

      My attention comes back to the garden this time of year. It’s too soon for annuals, too early for most perennials, and my sinuses are reminding me that the cool air is filling up with pollen. We celebrate the great awakening of the garden and surrounding landscape, even with a few sniffles and sneezes to punctuate the season.

      I know a few things about awakening. I came into this world in April, so I mark the end and subsequent beginning of another trip around the sun this month. Take enough of those trips, and reinvent yourself enough times, and you begin to see patterns of behavior. Learning who we are is like reading the current in a river, finding the deepest channel and accelerating downstream towards our destiny.

      I mostly write in a home office with a solid library of books patiently awaiting discovery. There are books I’ve read many times and books I’ve told myself I’ll get to someday. For better or worse the convenience of a Kindle tends to dominate my reading selection nowadays. So why keep books at all? For the same reason I plant daffodils. Daffodils are planted once and reappear in your life regularly to punctuate the moment. Books tend to do the same. I’ve turned to my collection many times over the years since I’ve planted them on the shelf.

      What we plant in ourselves tends to grow. Will we amend our minds with rich content and labor, or simply lean into whatever other’s grow for us? Give me dirty fingernails thumbing through favorite books. We mine for gold in the garden and in the library. These are our days to dig deeply and plant that which will live beyond us.

      Daffodils

    • The Rising

      Today being Easter and this blog never about religion, per se, but philosophy and nature and the bold act of reaching for something more than what we were yesterday, it seemed appropriate to talk about the rising. Not Jesus, for this I defer to the experts of stories written in the Bible (and only the true believers, not the posers and charlatans). There’s a smugness that punctuates religion on both sides of the conversation, but the true believers and the truly open non-believers find a way to meet in the middle. Whatever you believe, believe me when I say I hope it motivates you to do positive things in this world. We need it more than ever.

      Anyway, I digress. The rising I’m talking about are the daffodils, for they are rising in earnest to meet their moment even as I write this. Daffodils remain one of my favorite flowers for their simplicity, fragrance, and reliability. Deer and rodents don’t eat them, so they’re especially handy plants for those of us dealing with an abundance of each. Mostly, they’re a sign that spring is coming, often just when we needed it most. Daffodils represent hope and perseverance and resilience. They signal that beauty can rise from even the coldest and darkest of winters.

      Whatever we take from this day, we ought to focus on the ascent to beauty and love that we’re all capable of at our core. We just have to have the courage to rise to meet our moment. For there’s a place for us in this cold and indifferent universe. The evidence is right in front of us.

    • April Underfoot

      Star and coronal and bell
      April underfoot renews,
      And the hope of man as well
      Flowers among the morning dews.
      — A. E. Housman, Spring Morning

      Spring in the air, with a twist of biting cold thrust like a knife into the gut to keep you on your toes. That’s April in New England—best to appreciate the brief moments of wonder before the weather changes yet again. Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers precisely because they take it on the chin over and over again and still rise to the occasion. Who are we to complain?

      I’m not in a hurry to awaken the garden this year, feeling busy and distracted, but it doesn’t much matter whether I feel like awakening the garden or not, for the garden awakens. You either snap out of it and get ahead of things or you suffer through the ramifications of a rough start. There are beds to rake out, fallen branches to clear, fences to stand up, and soon sowing with more hope than a casual gardener has a right to. You’re either all in as a gardener or you concede it to the wild.

      I suppose I’m not quite ready for that. Like the daffodils we must rise and do what must be done. Our season is so brief and well underway. And there’s still hope for the harvest.