the company of flowers.

There's been a heatwave. I've been spending evenings in the garden, quietly sharing water with the plants. I've been trying to understand why I find the company of flowers so nourishing. I think it's something to do with their growth towards light, towards life. Something to do with how they emerge, soft and strong and delicate and so beautiful, in spite of everything.  

Spiders live in the garden too. Sharing space with so much life that isn't human life is incredible. I'd forgotten how sterile living in a home without an outdoors can feel.

After a few weeks of dry heat, it rained. I went outside after the storm and breathed it all in. Everything responding to everything else. Flowers wide-open and grateful.

My first dahlia blossomed like a summer firework. I put it in a jam-jar next to my only photograph of my grandfather. Gardens will always remind me of him.

I've been writing, reading, knitting, sleeping. Migraines come and go, storms passing across the sky. Politics are hard and ugly, of course, and the world is hot and angry and aflame. There's a tenderness in me lately that calls for quietness, for soft things. Water, peaches, the company of flowers. The softness of the little black cat who has adopted us, and who wakes me up every morning with cuddles and purrs.

A manifesto, a toast, a prayer:

here's to small and precious things.