Flowers

From when I was young, I was taught that flowers were beautiful. It’s a funny thing, teaching a person something is beautiful. But I guess at that time, I didn’t know what beautiful was. At the time, I didn’t know that flowers were the way they are because they want to make babies before they die, or that everything appealing in an instinctive sense was actually built that way so we favor it, might it be pursuit of beautiful women, or love for cute puppies. All I knew were that flowers were beautiful. So I studied them. Of course, in 3rd grade I learned about pistil and stamen, about anthers and pollen, and how male and female parts made seeds and fruit, but I studied them by touching. By smelling. By collecting pocketfuls of them and arranging them into larger flower patterns, a fractal of flowers, if you will. Or perhaps, fleur-ception. In art class, we learned how flowers come in different shapes and sizes and that a flower could be many things, so I started wondering, if many things could then be a flower. Drips of paint, splashing down onto blank paper kind of looked like flowers. So did the blot a sharpie makes when you hold it for too long against the paper. Well, this I guessed because you always got yelled at for wasting sharpie ink and bleeding through the paper.

What if I dripped a flower on top of another? a double flower. A smaller one, perhaps within a larger one, perhaps slightly to the side of a smaller one, just overlapping an even smaller one, all within a huge one. You had a flowerfield. A field of roses without the thorns, thistle flower heads without the barbs, tiny dandelions that would never spread their soft dandruff across your yard. The splotches of paint and marker, the concentric pattern of ink on my paper came to mean the best of the best, all that was beautiful nature could offer me. They became ideas. Big ideas, small ideas, bright ideas, simple ideas, sharp ideas, well rounded, centralized, spread out, deep, dark, heavy, ponderous, lithe, fluffy, frivolous ideas. All overlapping each other, interacting, combining. Blue ideas when inflected with yellow ideas became green ideas, red ideas and white ideas made ideas so hot it hurt my brain to consider their implications.

It was also about this time, that I learned that a boy could be ridiculed for loving flowers. And this was the time when a boy could also be ridiculed for having ideas. A boy could be ridiculed for seeking, loving, and beholding beauty. So I let my flowers fade, and I started drawing spaceships and rockets, blasters and lightsabers only in pencil, using only grey and brown and black legos, liking movies that were about soldiers in olive drab taking brown islands, wearing blase, monochromic colors. Why? because that’s what grownups did. That’s how things were in real life. Steel and blood. Earth, brick, fire, stone. Concrete, cement, dull, flat, asphalt. That’s how things were in REAL life. My world  became a white-washed, sand-blasted, world. Everything was the same. A Berlin wall of dull interest and fleeting fascination.

But the flowers were there. under the paint, under the surface. There will always be flowers. When the paint starts to flake and chip, when it curls, and peels, and falls to the ground, the flowers will be there. A glimpse of one is all it took. I found my flowers, or rather my flowers found me, or rather I found myself in the flowers. Your flowers may bud then bloom, but mine erupt. They explode out of near nothingness. They suddenly just are. So much so that sometimes I wonder if they always were, and if anyone could have found them. But I know my flowers are mine, and mine to share. That’s why I write. That's why I play music. To share my flowers.