FLOWER POWER

It's amazing what one can do in just a couple of hours. This afternoon I went out to work in the garden for two hours and during that time planted several varieties of flowers, two rows of radishes, one of lettuce, one of spinach and one of rocket, pruned the kinmokusei, stacked the firewood and sharpened a wedge, the list of things to do reaching from me to Tierra del Fuego, but at least I made a start. That was just a couple of hours in the afternoon.

And all the while I was delighting in the perfume wafting from the jinchoge, up in the cloud of consciousness wondering why it is that we humans love those fragrances so much. I'm human, I'm curious (two qualities not necessarily mutually defining); I know that evolutionarily it is good for the flowers: smell great, get propagated. But what is the evolutionary advantage in it for us humans? How does love of those fragrances enhance our survival? What advantage is it to pause in the grove of cherry blossoms and listen to the warbler sing, thereby sampling paradise, though it appears to offer no survival benefit? Indeed just the opposite, as implied in the danger-imminent cherry blossom scene in The Seven Samurai, one of the greatest scenes ever put on film, in the greatest movie ever made.

It must be that the fragrances of flowers touch memories far beyond our own, reach ancient and essential depths in us that would otherwise go unmet in the onrush of our lives, and that from flowers we learn how to be deeper in both person and spirit as we live and grow the tree of humanity. Clearly, there are those in positions of power who have never gotten a single thing from flowers; but judging by the beauty of these fragrances, so intimate with the winds of Spring and the spirit of change, flowers will never give up trying.