Flowers have been teaching me all my life. It began when I was young and I gradually learned to recognize individual flowers and call them by their proper, given names. I spent hours in graduate school, learning the names of hundreds of flowers that bloomed in the woods. It continues even now, as fellow gardeners teach me to recognize and name new flowers I have not paid attention to before.
Young children often stop by when I am busy in the garden and want to know what I am doing. Sometimes they are more interested in seeing the fish, but I don’t miss a chance to point out the individual flowers, the trilliums or the bloodroots. For parents, I point out the Fritillaria, a new-found delight of mine. For those who want to know, I name the Scilla and the assorted varieties in the garden.
Then one day it happened. All those names faded into the background. I still recognized their individual traits, but for me they all became flowers. Like the children visiting the garden, I simply saw them as flowers. It was their commonness that moved to the front. I saw them more by what they have in common, how they are all part of a whole. They are flowers.
Isn’t that how it is with all things? I spend much of my life learning to distinguish one thing from another. Then one day it happens. Everything takes on a unifying commonness. All things become part of one huge whole. Like flowers, every thing can be distinguished and be named. But the beauty is in the unity, how everything is connected and part of a whole.
I think I learned this from flowers.