For One Flower
Sometime around Candlemass, a spark flickers deep in the soil. Slowly a fire ignites and announces that the circle of eternal return is beginning to revolve again, and new life is emerging. Flowers have a special meaning in March. A March gift of flowers carries a message, memories, reminders. Instead of whom do these flowers bloom?
A crumpled red carnation alone in a smoky cafeteria on a table set with a white cloth, the smell of hairspray, perfume, spilled wine in the air. It is the 1980s, when there was the sense that each holiday carried something of its own opposite within it, the decade when women took their carnations in protest to the parliament. What are we actually celebrating on March 8, asked the female comrades, workers, and wives. What do you want from us?
In the early days of March, stinging nettles sprout behind a fence, a sturdy and resistant herb that isn’t harmed by frost, as the proverb goes. Mischievous little school children plucked stinging nettle and put it on the desk of the strictest teachers, usually the ones who taught them the most and whose lessons they would remember later in life. Stinging nettles are a medicinal and practical herb. And in the first days of spring, nettle soup has a purifying and curative effect.
In late spring, from the city asphalt, between the cracks in the sidewalk, beside the concrete buildings, where it seems that nothing could ever sprout, nothing could grow, there blooms a rose that didn’t perish over winter. It brings a fragile beauty to the concrete jungle, finds a beam of light between the high walls, claiming its little piece of sky, a ray of serenity in the everyday clamour of the world.
Dandelion in the meadow, modest and stalwart. The bitter taste of their leaves is earthy, good for salad, the practical vegetable vendor comments. But the yellow flower rises as sweet and fragrant as honey. In a couple of weeks, its downy fluff will scatter around the world, soft as breath, spreading its seed for all the springs to come.
A white lily grows in the afternoon heat that settles on the land, beside a chapel at a dusty Pannonian crossroads, its innocent pallor contemplating with something almost like melancholy the visage suffering on the cross. Her serenity intoxicates all those who pass by.
Above the treeline, between the clouds and the summit, a solitary blue campanula blossoms between a crack in the stones, as if it is the only one on earth. For what sickness does this flower grow?
What does a flower mean? Can one flower move the world? “Pick only one flower…my darling…” writes the poet, a small action that sends a powerful message.
What can one flower say about the world, which for a long time pays attention only to the noisiest, the brassiest, the loudest, and doesn’t notice the miracle of a single flower?
In March, we hear the roar of great words about women’s position in the world: emancipation, empowerment, resistance fly around our ears. Sometimes the words seem uncomfortable and uneasy, as if they were the oversized padded shoulders on blazers from the 1980s, the time when women first began to question the message of March 8 and wonder if the so-called “power suit” was just another name for the costume of a superheroine who had too heavy a burden placed on her shoulders. Both symbolic and everyday burdens.
What does the world want of women?
In the difficult, strange, and demanding past year, the world wanted more and more of women. At the intersection of the biological and the social, women carried the heaviest burden during the health crisis: as health care workers, teachers, saleswomen, mothers, caregivers. With their small actions, the everyday blossoms of their work, they held the world together.
The most powerful message is often carried by the smallest and most ordinary action. The greatest stories are written with tiny letters.
Each of has the challenge as we go through life to answer two questions about ourselves: Who am I? and What am I? While you can answer the first one yourself and simply accept it as a given, the second question addresses your essence. What defines you is decided by life and the world. The same world that we create each day anew with our actions.
Often it turns out that the world is not created by the pointless battles against each other we witness these days. The world lives from moment to moment, from day to day. It lives millions of small realities, billions of human beings who live their realities from the moment they are born, ripening and passing, their hopes, disappointments, victories and defeats, pain and joy. And perhaps the reality of women’s existence is captured more by a flower than by all the vehement social discourse about March 8 that place on her shoulders all the baggage from the past centuries and all the responsibilities of the coming decades.
Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to gaze at the beauty of a single flower. Who today can be amazed at one flower in a time when all we do is troll, click, share? In a time when we have to distance, accuse, attack? Even flowers are different each year, even if they bloom from the same roots, sprout from the seeds of last year’s flowers. But each year they gaze at a different world.
The eternal return of the same thing that each spring breathes new will into life does not return the same way each year. Each year, it comes back reborn, enriched with its passing and the experience of the cyclical flow; the same, but also different. Each year we are all different, even if we are the same people. And only when we look back do we realize what we have become. What kind of world we have created.
Emancipation literally means “take into your own hands”. Do we dare to take into our hands one single flower? A flower that reflects the whole world. Carnation, stinging nettle, lily, dandelion, and campanula. Are you a symbol or a wake-up call?