there are tiny flowers blooming in the yard.

On presence and not knowing a single thing.

There are tiny flowers blooming in my yard. An extraordinary, unbelievable number of flowers.

I’ve been trying to do less lately. Way, way less. A month or so ago I realized I was trying to stuff so much into my brain all the time. If I went for a walk, I had a podcast on. In the mornings, I would try to quiet my brain by reading the Bible and listening to the news (this was not, dear reader, remotely effective). If I had fifteen spare minutes in between classes, I would get ahead on reading or check my email.

If I could just get far enough ahead, I thought, then I could finally relax.

This is fake.

I’m sure most of you already know that this is fake. I’m just a slow learner, so I have to re-learn it again every now and again.

We will never be caught up enough to feel like we can “safely” rest. There is no safe resting. There is only stealing away. There is only leaving tomorrow’s responsibilities to tomorrow. There is only creating little nests of time where we can stay quiet and choose to actually exist inside of our lives.

So, recently, I’ve started puttering.

I’ve started going out into the backyard and just sitting there. Walk around, pull a weed, pet the dog, look at a flower. And I’ve realized there is an insane, miraculous overwhelm of flowers growing in our yard. Growing where no one asked them to – growing where they grow. Some purple ones, some tiny blue ones, some tall vibrant pink and white ones. And the biggest, lushest patches of clover I’ve ever seen.

And as soon as I noticed them… I wanted to know every single thing about them.

I wanted to take out my plant identification app and figure out the name of every plant in my yard. If I could only call it by its name – then I could really know it. Then I would really be able to experience it. Then I could somehow capture it, labeled in a file folder deep in my mind somewhere.

I wanted to pull out my phone to take photos of all the flowers I could find. If I could only get the angle, the lighting just right, I could experience this feeling over and over again whenever I want. I took a few photos, and none of them did justice to their miraculous, unplanned presence.

My first instinct, in the face of all this life, was to try to capture it. To hold it. To control it, somehow.

Then, somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered a poem I’d heard.

---

Where We Are Headed || Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

At first we just say flower. How
thrilling it is to name. Then it’s
aster. Begonia. Chrysanthemum.

We spend our childhood learning
to separate one thing from another.
Daffodil. Edelweiss. Fern. We learn

which have five petals, which have six.
We say, “This is a gladiolus, this hyacinth.”
And we fracture the world into separate

identities. Iris. Jasmine. Lavender.
Divorcing the world into singular bits.
And then, when we know how to tell

one thing from another, perhaps
at last we feel the tug to see not
what makes things different, but

what makes things the same. Perhaps
we feel the pleasure that comes
when we start to blur the lines—

and once again everything
is flower, and by everything,
I mean everything.

---

We want to engage – deeply – with the world around us. And for most of our human minds, knowing feels satisfying. Being able to categorize, capture, hold feels satisfying. 

What if we tried something else?

What if we allow those lines to start to blur? What if we allow everything — and I mean everything — to become flower?

What if engaging deeply with the world around us means not knowing everything about what is around us, but being with what is around us? 

What if bearing witness is enough?

Once I gave myself permission not to know, I started to slow down. I started to actually arrive.

This is an act of faith — this arrival. We can absolve ourselves of the responsibility of capturing all this beauty because we trust that there will be plenty more tomorrow. Beauty is abundant. The Divine is abundant and creative in its gifts to us.

It’s April, and I am surrounded by purple flowers.
I walk around the yard. I putter.
I feel proud of the patches of clover, how they make the most of the early spring sun before the tall summer grasses overtake them.
I clap for the wildflowers that love the shade behind the recycling bin.
Soon, I will wave goodbye to the tiny blue buds when they disappear and make way for wild strawberries.

That’s plenty.