To everything a season

Nothing is pretty in my garden right now.  Spring arrives late where I live and the daffodils are just beginning to poke their noses through the cold, wet dirt.  Every year I’m amazed at their resilience: every year they die back and disappear as if they never were; but every year they poke their sweet, little noses back up in the spring and showcase their dazzling blooms and fragrance. It defies reason, really.

Despite Spring’s relatively late arrival in my neck of the woods, I am–without fail–nearly giddy with excitement at seeing various perennials emerge from the ground.  One of my favorite flowers is the self-seeding annual Love-in-a-Mist.  (Self-seeding means that the original plant dies every year, but the seeds from the original grow a new plant the following season; cool, right?). The plant itself is small, no more than 8 ” to 12 ” in height and the flower is maybe an inch diameter.  It blooms in mid to late summer here.

Their appearance simultaneously blesses and saddens me.

 Source

I’m always blessed by its seemingly sudden appearance and its ethereal beauty.  It’s far more beautiful than anything that I create, and it does nothing to generate such beauty.

Source

Source

Source

But its appearance saddens me as well.  Its flowers are short-lived.  As in, I notice the bud one day, it blooms the next, and the petals fall to the ground the following.  And then, a lovely seed pod, promising flowers in the next year.

Source

Maybe it’s one of my favorite flowers because its ephemeral nature offers a metaphor for the fleeting, beauty-filled moments that mark our respective lives.  Luminous moments that still shape us even now: for me, spending evenings under the stars with my man; gliding over a quiet lake in the BWCA in the early evening hours, utterly enchanted by its stillness and wild beauty; or marveling at the perfection of color in my children’s eyes.  And then, the bittersweet knowledge in those luminous moments, of knowing that the moment can’t last, and won’t last, but still allowing oneself to be moved by its beauty and power.

As the wise Teacher writes in Ecclesiastes, and as reiterated in the Beatles song (!):

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

Here’s to savoring those luminous, magical  moments… and to planting time!