Be a Flower: A letter to the reader
photo by lizzie rice
Be a Flower: A letter to the reader
second year ostara maharaj
The Gardenia: an evergreen shrub with thick, glossy, dark green leaves. Means trust, hope, peace renewal, and protection.
The Carnation: A single flower, delicate multi-petaled, double blossom at the end of a long stem. Means love.
At the beginning of August of 2021, after moving me into my freshman dorm, my mother gifted me a single gardenia in a paper cup. She told me to remember that she was always with me; that I should cherish the good and remember that the bad times would pass. Come June of 2022, I had kept that gardenia, pressed it, and put it on her birthday card. In the same manner, at the end of the summer, I got my mom a bouquet of carnations, as a “thank you” for all her help moving me in. A month later she sent me a picture of a different bouquet, with some of the same flowers from the one I had gotten her, and some different ones. She explained that she was going to throw away the bad parts, but instead decided to retrieve them from the trash can, cut out the dead leaves, and add them to the new bouquet she had just bought from trader joes. She went on to remind me:
“when we get wounded, the bad parts of us die. We let them go. And we still blossom as beautifully as we can”
Her words reminded me of the gardenia; how I changed a lifeless object into something meaningful, because I was willing to accept it for what it was: a dry, dead flower. Call me Victor Frankenstein.
I’m not big on superstitions or fate, but it was funny that she sent me that little message on a day where I felt so confused about being back in Athens. I had been thinking: Why does this feel so foreign? Why can’t I just settle? I’ve done this before… am I literally stupid ? It should be easy.
I believe the flaw in my thinking was that I expected to come back to the Athens I left in May; not from an academic standpoint, but in terms of how established my routine was and how solid my outlook on my tasks were. But this isn’t May. This is a new schedule, a new apartment with new roommates, new classes, and more. With that in mind, something I’m still coming to terms with is the fact that growth- in all aspects, whether within the mind, body, or relationships- is not linear. There’s no consistent line sloping towards this grand goal of “your best self”. If that were the case, we could just figure out the equation and be on our way.
Another thing I’m still working on accepting is that you don’t have to mourn the life experiences that aren’t happening anymore. Instead, you can extract what you learned from those experiences and let that live on with you. You don’t have to mourn your past self, because that’s still you. It is human to be flawed, learning, and getting there- even if you don’t know what “there” is. Change, even if it is just moving to college (for the second time), throws you off. Sure, it’s healthy to recognize the traits in yourself that you value, but you can be at peace with the fact that you’re trying your best.
It’s cliche and overdone: white male poets using flowers as a metaphor for their “muse,” (How pure and untouched is she? How supple and feminine!), to Georgia O’keeffe and Sylvia Plath’s flowery feminism. But I hope that I, along with you, can take inspiration from my flowery friends: bloom as beautifully as you can. Let yourself grow unkempt and asymmetrically. Take in the sun, drink plenty of water, and don’t be so hard on yourself.