Flower Time

It's Valentine's Day...Flowers abound...

Flowers, the researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey tell us, help people feel less depressed, anxious or agitated.

Wow - how does that work? is it their smell? their color? My own thinking tells me it is something else:  flowers affect us positively because they are nature's siren song.

Flowers are the seductive cloak of Mother Nature, her wildly sensuous creations that beguile us with their colors, petals, patterns and more.  How can you be depressed among a spray of roses? or a bowl of mums? or a vase of baby's breath and  lilies?....

They are the apex of nature's cycle - there is no higher point on the biological spiral.
Flowers stop time - at its most fertile and tantalizing instant.

It is this ephemeral period of time that flowers represent. They bring silent joy and love to anyone in their presence.

Writing about time reminds me of Deborah Solomon's conversation with the noted and amazing sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy. He, too, alluded to this notion of time:

"I asked Goldsworthy to define the word ''landscape,'' and he replied, a bit cryptically: ''A landscape does not have to involve land. Time is a landscape....Time gives,'' Goldsworthy insisted cheerfully, sitting down for a break. ''Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change.."
(Stone Diarist, By Deborah Solomon, NYT,  May 16, 2004) 

In the case of flowers, it also gives heart, the possibility of life renewed and the reminder of the inherent beauty within the most unlikely sources.

Happy Valentine's Day!  And may the flowers be with you.

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