May 28, 2006
a rose spirit
When a rose dies its petals fall to earth with a gentle sigh. The silken skin mottles, wilts, and crumbles into dust. The dust becomes another rose. Another garden. I think there may be a rose spirit that rises as its mortal flower falls. The inner eye of the gardener sees it. The gardener propagates and waters, dreams and waits for the bud to fatten and burst its plain container, spilling colors of blood and flame, sun and shadow, nacre and cloud in a swirled mandala of brief perfection. In the eye of the mandala is the spirit of the rose, a future rose, another May, a different garden.
My mother's spirit left her mortal frame today. A brilliant May day awash in the colors and scents of roses. She has tended her last rose and become one in this gardener's eye. A vivacious red and a sunny yellow rose. A wildly rampant rose. A thorny mildewed rose that refuses to give up. My sorrow at her leaving me, her petals at my feet, is great and deep as oceans. But I went out this morning to tend her garden, water the roses, watch the squirrels at play, listen to the birds sing. And for another brief eternity she blooms.
Briggs, Thank you for your loving introduction to your mother. I’m sorry for your loss and hope it’s a small consolation that it was a beautiful day.
Your passage sent me watering the gardens of my family‘s memory; places where roses are more than roses and Mr. Lincoln’s thorns draw more than metaphorical blood when one plucks with less than alacrity.
Prismic drops of light play from my stepmother Shirley’s hose, her green thumb bridging our differences as she waters my diseased mother Jane’s Josephs Coat. Jorge plants the climber that my father Roland was digging a hole for when he died of a heart attack - it reaches to porch now. The cement mixer that my grandmother Faye found running when my grandfather Sim died masoning a flower bed was used by my father and me to build our patio. Sim‘s trowels are with my tools.
Dust to dust, loam to loam. We find ourselves in community with plants, dirt, water, sun, cats,worms and things that smell green and shine pink.
Left for us, who inherit garden memories, a healing of thorn’s wounds. Soft petals quickly return to the soil, thorns linger a while on the vine.
Posted by: Stefan Schinzinger on June 17, 2006 6:08 PM