stopping to see the rose

“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince 

I confess I’ve been rather idle on this week off from work.  I accomplished some minor household chores.  I picked up my farm share and even cooked up some excess vegetables – some even in the name of celebrating the country’s birthday.  But mostly I’ve occupied the greater portion of my week with Netflix or skulking on the meaningless Internet.

The one good thing is some of that computer time has actually been an increased word count on my current manuscript.  It’s still a jumble of plot and narratives… but those are quite possibly shaping themselves into… dare I say it?  A story.  That said, today I still felt the dreamlike conscious this week’s reality yields.  The other reality is hinting at a re-entrance… and then, of course… the reality we all stay in a dream to avoid seeped in around lunchtime.

Even when you’ve had months to anticipate the inevitability, the exit of a soul from our world is sad.  Especially when it is the soul of a beautiful woman who encouraged artists, young and young at heart - a neophyte writer too shy to admit to her co-workers that she, too, was attempting to earn a living in the creative arts that didn’t require databases and babysitting details.  A magnificent woman who was a writer in her own poetic right.

And then, the universe showed some poetry.  A collision of observations that may or may not be coincidence, but one that compelled me to get the camera and take a snapshot of one magical moment.

At the side of my porch is a rose bush that due to neglect and a brutal, premature blight of snow got trimmed almost to its roots.  I had hoped the thing would re-grow in time… a year or two as it may have required for that initial bloom years ago.  But the hot June sun and generous rain has allowed the greenery to stretch back towards the porch floor.  And then, early this evening when I decided a breath of cool New England summer air was a necessary pause, I saw the bud readying itself for a bloom.

 

Maybe this has nothing to do with the events of my week.  Or maybe it is simply a glimpse of fragile beauty to contrast the sad news today.  Or maybe I make a bigger deal of this simply because I have a horticulture defying rose bush embedded in a plot of my current novel… and seeing that it isn’t such a leap of faith to contemplate things validates my fiction.

Or maybe it is just a moment.  A moment of beauty and nature and art and inspiration.