Category Archives: Flowers

Openness to the Everyday

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I brought home flowers and they all opened. Immediately.

The flowers I am writing about are the tulips. The orchid next to them was an anniversary gift I gave my husband, and it has been blooming since I purchased it, a week before our anniversary in August. This gift foreshadowed another gift: the job Will would get, embodied by the the large pink orchid. It is on loan from Will’s employer, Seattle Orchid. They will only sell perfect flowers (and can I say they are stunning flowers!) so they lent us this one, which was missing a bud (Will had to point it out to me – I couldn’t see it). I was walking yesterday, in hopes of wearing off some melancholy and saw the tulips at the Pike Place Market. I give my husband flowers as gifts. I was thinking of him when I saw them, and had five dollars I did not need. So I bought $5 worth of tulips.

The vases are wine bottles, wrapped in raffia. Not just any wine bottles. These are from our wedding, and graced the tables with a dahlia silkscreen design of Will’s grandmother that we pulled. Our friends helped supply us with their empty bottles (that’s what friends are for) and we scrubbed off the labels and tied raffia around them to make them pretty. They were set on the tables by our families and friends, helping us prepare for the celebration of a promise we made to spend our lives together. Our wedding, for us, was as much a celebration of the people who we love and who love us, of whom we are so blessed to have in our lives. A more beautiful day I could not fathom.

The bottles were on our balcony for a bit, for the winter. The raffia got a touch tattered. Life’s been rough (as it will be) and I know there have been times that Will and I felt weathered with life and each other. Weather has sun and rain, warmth and cold, but I digress. This is a sunny time for us. The bottles didn’t break under the weather. I cleaned and disinfected the bottles, filled them with water, and then put the tulips in.

The tulips were purchased and carried home closed. An hour later, the petals were opening.

Of course the flowers would open when placed in such a loving context. 

I find myself seeking and finding symbolism in every day life. You could call that “superstitious”. Fair enough. Small coincidences give me hope in the same way that rituals comfort me. They are both invented signs of continuity which serve to structure some meaning in my life. I am still figuring out my beliefs relating to any deity, but I would say that any god that makes sense to me is an implicit one, not an explicit one.

As UU’s, I would say that we are open and honest regarding our invention of symbols and rituals. Perhaps there is something about tulips that I don’t know, that the warmth of the indoors motivates them to open in ways the cold Pike Place Market wouldn’t. I do love that Unitarian Universalism is a faith which permits its adherents to look around the world and make sense of it on their own, to cultivate the awe in the everyday without having to have the answers. Cold atheism does not permit the awe of the flowers blooming. Perhaps you can tie it to biology, but I posit that there is more to explaining the world than science. My spirituality may be confused, but it exists, growing and blooming.

Unitarian Universalism gets accused of having a flaky theology. Frankly, I find the openness to possibility more likely to lead one to Truth than a religion that has all the answers. Any religion requires you to rely on the human interpreters to get it right. Even science, which also claims to be the way to answers, is also subject to human failing and, in some cases, deliberate fraud. As long as it is a system of knowledge that people created (read: all of them), it is inherently flawed. I cannot have all the answers. Neither can you. I wish I did. I wish you did as well, but we are limited in our humanity. I think this acknowledgment is the strength of UUism. My faith lets me pray thankfully when tulips open in my wedding vases, with an intuitive understanding that does not fit science. That is fine. Being UU does not confine my thought or human experience.

Of course, life turns around and reminds me not to get too sentimental. If I am going to make signs in everything, I should note that I awoke this morning to find one of the tulips had been chewed to pieces, the likely culprit my kitten. So it goes…

*gush*

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Today Will wished me a happy anniversary to the 19th Amendment and gave me flowers because he felt I could use some cheering up (I was down in the dumps last night).

Remember, dahlias are special to us because my mother in law (here in five days!!!!) grew them for our wedding.

I’m going to try not to make this my “OMG I have the best partner ever” blog but lately he’s making the temptation too great to resist.

The Syracusans… THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

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Will and I ventured out today. And did something besides grocery shop. Or exploration.

Yesterday we were tourists and checked out the Pike Place Market. And like us, no one there was *actually* from Seattle. I don’t really get it. It’s crowded, chinsy, and full of expensive food. Listen, I like eating well as much as the next person. But the same stuff is so much cheaper at the Broadway Market, that I don’t get it. But we did find a dahlia!

That’s what you’d call a lousy picture of me but a decent one of the dahlia. If you were at my wedding you would know that my aforementioned much loved mother in law actually grew flowers for our wedding. And she grew dahlias which other friends saved wine bottles (and drank the wine, serious business!) for vases. So dahlias have a certain meaning for Will and I, generally reminding us that we’re loved.

Speaking of weddings, my parents’ was thirty years ago today. And get this, they are still together. :D Happy Anniversary to the best parents ever! Sorry, I bet you think your parents are pretty sweet. But you should try being raised by mine.

Today, we decided to do what lots of God-fearing couples set out to do: find a church. Except we’re not particularly God fearing at all, Will being an atheist and I’m closer to agnostic than anything else. But the resemblance is striking. I think we could have fooled someone.

That is, until we got to aforementioned church of choice. I think I mentioned that I was a member of the UU Church of Amherst. The first day I showed up there, an awesome gal who is now studying to be a minister, Michelle George, showed me around the place and made me feel welcome. Actually, everyone there made me feel welcomed despite (inspite?) of the fact I ranged from 1/3 to 1/2 the age of most of the regulars. Hoping I did not exhaust all of my religious karma on the first place I went, Will and I decided to check out University Unitarian Church. The UU Association tells me that the congregation is HUGE (826!) so we figured if we are going to meet people… you go where people are.

So Rev. Dr. Alicia Grace gives this really great sermon and says all sorts of lovely words that I needed to hear. And then it’s over. Uh, do they do a coffee hour? How are we supposed to meet people? Panic of perpetual anomie sets in. Listen, we have high hopes here. With the exception of the exceptional Rich Strahan, we know no one in Seattle. So we follow the crowd (yes, crowd) out. Phew! Coffee! Not the first time that those words have crossed my mind, but this was a different reason. No, here I was not trying to satiate my ever growing caffeine addiction. Here I was seeking an ice breaker.

So we shuffle over to the coffee table, and shuffle to the sugar table, which is just as important. (This makes me a bad vegan. So do my Dr. Martens.) So I have coffee in hand and decide to do what has become something I’m known for: talking to strangers. See, I took a hiatus when some rather stressful events in my life meant that suddenly I need to devote nearly all my energy to dealing with stress. Hey, did you know that moving across the country is less than a piece of cake? It’s not even a cookie crumb. Shucks. Anyway, I strike up a conversation with an elderly fellow who looks friendly. I introduced myself and Will, and then he asks us if we are visitors. Will tells him that we are looking to stay, see we just moved to Seattle from Buffalo, NY.

“Buffalo? Oh, I know that neck of the woods. I’m originally from Syracuse.”

My eyes light up like a supernova on a new moon. Turns out he’s a lifelong Universalist, went to high school at Central Tech. And we got his life story which involved lots of moving, but hey. Who would have thought the first person I spoke to in a church 3,000 miles from my place of birth was born there too.

We got hooked up with the people who run the Young Adult Group, so that looks promising. Seemed like a bunch of cool cats, and by cats I mean people because really the two shouldn’t be confused. Had an interesting conversation with a woman on the bus ride home who was really disappointed to find out that I am not a witch. Outside of covens and renaissance fairs, UU churches are actually pretty reliable places to find witches. They are also really good places to find spiritual people and atheists and people who aren’t comfortable really labeling their spirituality. And awesome. Excellent place to find awesome.

You know where else you can find awesome? Farmer’s markets.

Now, the awesome here changes a bit in definition. Here awesome takes on the shades of fresh raspberries, blueberries, fennel, rainbow swiss chard (which a friend of mine who is spending his summer playing in the dirt working in a community garden tells me just is like that… naturally) and flowers. I used to hate flowers, until I realized I was just bitter about their ties to hegemonic ideas of romance and gender roles. I decided that for the sake of not denying awesomeness, I can disavow the patriarchy without disavowing the fact that contrary to how I dress, I really like color.

So the Broadway Farmer’s Market  is just chock full of really interesting produce that we’re not accustomed to seeing in Buffalo, like baby fennel and the like. And it’s mostly organic, which means mostly tasty but that means that our unemployed selves need to be a bit careful/conscientious and not just let our minds wander with all the dishes we want to make. Will and I LOVE to cook, love to bake, and are fans of eating too.

And then there are the flowers.

That’s a $5 splurge right there that makes our apartment glow. I wanted to get flowers last week, but I was like, gee, this is kind of frivolous, we don’t have anything to put it in, I mean we got a dahlia yesterday (which proceeded to wilt on the way home), I mean, uh, and then Will was just kind of like, “We can spare $5″ and then mentioned something about me beaming or whatever looking at the flowers. OK, I really like flowers. I can admit it. But then again, he was thrilled too.

Now to figure out dinner. I’m going to post some made-up recipes one of these days.