Dear readers,
Alas, the peeks of spring have sprung. Can you see it? I feel like a sunflower tilting towards the light and finally opening up to the world, smiling. “I am no moonflower”, I remarked the other day. Daylight Savings seems to have saved me. Yesterday evening felt like a pilgrimage to West Side Highway to honor the orange rays past 7 PM. I close my eyes and feel the bustling wind calling to me, stirring up a newness of altered perspective. Even the wind is signaling change, and I am listening.
The impulsive urges come with the spring time - reawakened desires and unrooted bulbs of being gone dormant in the frost. I’ve been awaking with different urges: Today, the indulgence of sleeping in while the morning sun seeped through the linen and onto my skin. Yesterday, the urgent need to write a poem - words spilling out into stanzas of thoughts unseamed. Saturday, the sudden wish to open the window and smell freshly cut grass.
I have never craved a smell before. Nostalgia pulls at the heartstrings, and the sinuses too, it seems. Perhaps the fresh cut grass reminds me of waking up to the sound of the lawn mower on Saturday mornings - my dad making laps around the front lawn while the fresh dew still rests upon each blade, which meant I had slept in.
Yesterday, I heard wind chimes for the very first time in the city while walking to my studio - a melodic ring coming from a 3rd floor fire escape surrounded by prayer flags, a makeshift altar of sorts. A comforting sound that brought me back to childhood again, spurring images of the giant four-foot-tall wind chime that hung from our house like an over-sized ornament. It sang like the sirens of the sea upon the breeze. Wind chimes and cut grass - the vivid sensations of my youth - the springtime of our lives.
Frequenting the flower market, I get an early pulse on the seasons before the weather catches up. Spring blossoms of branches fill the block these days: cherry blossom, forsythia, tulip magnolia. I read in my moon journal a ritual of placing sprigs of branches around your home and adding ribbons to them as a blessing for the coming of spring. Yesterday in my floral studio, I did just that. One twig, then three, then five, of yellow forsythia branches brightening up my space, a small pink ribbon fastened on tight.
By the end of the day, with the early afternoon light bouncing onto the forsythia, another urge emerged: to create a celebratory spring wreath. This is my favorite kind of flower play, an afternoon of solitude and spontaneous experimentation with the elements and whatever scraps I have around. The sturdiness of a metal frame felt obtrusive for the delicate yellow flowers and my sensitive soul, so I wove the forsythia into a circle bound by its own curvatures and bends - the forgiving nature of fresh, flexible twigs fused together into being; shifting shapes into form, the children of trees not yet hardened.
What emerged was not what I expected, and that's perhaps the greatest gift of floristry as a craft - the balance between intentional and unintentional beauty; an inherent serendipity within the blooms themselves.
The wreath is sparse - unwieldy, wild, spritely, spirited - with the open inside feeling oddly too gaping and vulnerable in proportion to its circumference. And yet, I welcome this spaciousness and its speckles of strawflowers - the spawning of something new. To me, it looks like spring, and feels like childhood.
xx,
Emily
