Bouquets for the Wedding

I was on the flower committee for a neighbor's wedding. She choose dahlias and zinnias from a local flower farmer, plus a scattering of celosia, dianthus, and even spider flower. Five of us spent the morning arranging flowers into 30 vases for the dinner tables. They were beautiful.

Sunday morning, the flowers traveled to the post-wedding brunch. And then, they dispersed. I brought one bouquet home with me.

The flowers, the wedding, the preparation, and all those worker bees created a beautiful setting for the wedding, the reception, and the brunch. The wedded couple launched into their married lives. All around me sat divorced women, widowed women and men, a young woman married two years ago and now separated. In the moment, we rejoiced in the happiness of the wedding and ignored those other feelings.

Wedding Flowers

Alison from Floral Artistry

My sweetie, whose right leg is still in a brace after emergency knee surgery 5 weeks ago, played his keyboard for a wedding at the Grafton Inn yesterday. When we arrived early in order to get him set up, Alison, the florist, was at work on the wedding arbor.

So beautiful. And so temporary. The bride throws her bouquet. We could say "throws it away." The flower girls litter the aisle with rose petals and leave their baskets sitting in the grass.

The piano plays. The wedding begins.  The wedding ends.

Impermanence.
The music is gone. The wedding is gone. The flowers are gone.

Pay It Forward

A Dharma Friend is coming this morning to cut flowers for her daughter's wedding. My flower garden might look bare tomorrow. Or i might not even be able to tell the difference.

Should i close my heart out of fear of the unknown? Shall i be close-fisted (also called grasping)?
Or shall i open my hand in friendliness and generosity?
What would you do?

I could pay it forward---as opposed to paying back the innumerable kindnesses that have been done to me. Just last week someone gave me 3 plants and 2 kinds of seed. I might or might not ever pay her back in plants, but i can pay the plants--or flowers--forward. Today.

Cultivating Beauty

A neighbor's daughter is having her wedding in my meadow next week, and i've been prissing up the strip beds near the vegetable garden all spring. These beds are simply 3-foot wide strips of flowers separated by 3 feet of grass that my sweetie can mow in one pass on his riding mower.

Usually i use these 17 strip beds for cutting flowers; they're filled with reseeding annuals that volunteer every year to prettify the meadow. This year i'm out there every day, dead-heading and weeding.

These reseeding annuals are not so different from the effect of meditation on our lives. We cultivate beautiful states of mind such as kindness, compassion, generosity, and patience. The seeds of these divine qualities flower and reseed themselves in our lives, sometimes showing up in unexpected places.