“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried,
but you’ve actually been planted.” ― Christine Caine
Flowers
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
— Walt Whitman
“But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.” — Rachel Carson
〰️ Monarch Butterfly
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” ― Sylvia Plath
“One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care.
Such is the quality of bees…” ― Leo Tolstoy
“Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that their suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is their own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Imperfection is beauty,
madness is genius
and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
— Marilyn Monroe
“Although most flowers have a multitude of symbolism, the cleome flower only has the one. These flowers have stuck with their old-fashioned expression that asks the recipient to elope, or run away with the giver. Although these flowers can be presented as a proposition between new lovers,
they are also a unique gift that can be traded between long married couples –
asking each other if they would leave the world behind and get married once again.”
Maverick Mist 