Late Bloomers

Last June, an ad for specimen dahlias appeared on my computer screen.  Even in digital form, they were breath taking. I clicked through the order process, the address steps and on to the payment numbers. At the exorbitant shipping fee, I stopped, and decided that I could do without.

But we all know how something of true beauty can haunt one.

The next time I was at my garden center, I took a look – just to see — if they carried dahlia bulbs.   In addition to their beauty, I could relate to their status as late bloomers, not showing up until well into autumn — a fitting metaphor for life as I am living it these days.  At a time when my garden would have put forth its big show and be preparing for rest, these divas with their seasonal swan song were irresistible.

I plunked three dusty brown corms into the ground with no idea how much space they would require, whether they’d thrive in the conditions I was able to provide them, or how they’d behave as bloomers.  I knew that my capacities to tend to them, regularly water, etc., were limited.

It was a wild shot – but then, what in life isn’t?

Summer came in earnest.  Long, hot dry spells.  Record breaking heat.  Then weeks of monsoons.  Each time I walked the garden, I’d peer down and see the identification tags I’d propped up with a bit of bamboo.   They were still there.   But there was nothing to show for them.  The odds that my hopeful gesture would bear fruit were looking dim.

Then, in August, a pale green flag raised its head. Life, pushing up.

Then, nothing more.

Last weekend, as I got out of the car, a brilliant, smiling sun beamed at me from out of the foliage.  And others, at least a half dozen, behind it.

When I look at this dahlia, I become engulfed in it. Its radiance, its other-earthly beauty. Exactly the same way I become engulfed in a toddler freely running in a park, all of her joy still coiled deep within, a reserve on which she draws effortlessly — and we, in her wake.

Elaine Scarry, the essayist and Harvard professor who has written on everything from torture to dreams, a number of years ago authored a small, remarkable book, On Beauty and Being Just.  In it, she argues that beauty holds one of our most precious keys to regulating and encouraging our understanding of equality and justice.  The balance of light and dark, values, perspective, and harmony, she argues, expand our sensibilities to the point of liberating them.  Beauty breaks us out of our dull half lives, our unchallenged certainties, and enables us to see new possibilities for our life with others.

As one of the wise monks at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in nearby Cambridge recently wrote:

Live as stewards of all that has been entrusted to you. Use what you have been given for God’s glory and for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. Use it to bless the lives of others, to bring hope where there is despair, to create possibilities where all seems dead and lost. (Br. David Vryhof)

We’ve settled for so much less than the beauty that leaps out from our gardens and playgrounds and especially from the unexpected places – nursing homes, subway platforms, long lines.  Because we spend most of our days now staring into screens, and on screens, into the infinite variations of man-made objects that pass for beautiful, we are rarely interrupted by nature’s far greater capacity to surprise and change us.

There was a time when nature was our model for our creativity.  But we’ve stepped into the field of our own visions so completely that we too often no longer see past them.  Inevitably, we become hostage to our narrow images of light and dark.

The same day that I discovered the dahlia, The New York Times published a first person account that has haunted me every bit as much, if not more.  The author and his brother were arrested on attempted murder charges as teens.  Both spent 17 years in New York State prisons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/aging-inmates-prisons-mandatory-sentencing.html

By an act of faith and a sense of true possibility, their judge just did what the system almost never does, and instead of giving them both life without parole, sentenced them to 17 1/2 years.  When their first parole hearing came up, they were released for good behavior and significant contributions to prison life.

The author is currently an undergraduate at Cornell University majoring in government.  His brother is at Columbia University in the Justice-in-Education program.  Two admitted felons from the “wrong” side of town, are rebuilding their futures in Ivy League colleges, committed to improving life for others from their own experience of justice.

To really see a single flower can change the moral calculus.

What if, instead of the problems, we saw the beauty hidden in their midst?  The dignity in striving, even in the wake of bad choices, mistaken directions, and poor conditions for growth?  What if, for a moment in these terribly dark times, we turned – not away from “reality” but to the enduring truth of ordinary, and not terribly well-tended gardens?