What can flowers teach us about resilience? 🌸
Right now, all of us are having to make a conscious decision to bloom where we are planted, to seek out tiny, incremental joys in the everyday, not knowing what the future will bring us. Here’s a piece I wrote last year about how flowers teach us hope and resilience.
It was my grandmother who first taught me to find beauty.
A homemaker who had studied botany in college, she always knew the names of plants we saw together during family hikes in the Appalachian mountains. My sisters and I loved trilliums the best. Their trio of smooth white petals, outstretched like tiny hands, had an otherworldly beauty that surprised us. Even the name “trillium” seemed fairy-like and magical. We’d make a game of spotting them every time we walked among old forests filled with moss and murmuring creeks and waterfalls. Looking back at that time, I like to think my grandmother was teaching us to keep our eyes and hearts open to hope, which like trilliums, always showed up, year after year, when you least expected it.
When I grew up and went away to college, I chose to be a Longhorn at the University of Texas at Austin. I like to tell people that if you’re an out-of-state student, going to UT is basically like studying abroad. Living there when you’re not from Texas can feel quite foreign at times, especially if you’re an artist type…
