So there I was on the telephone, telling my mother about how I thought the ranunculus was superior to the rose, and how unfair it was that everyone else didn’t think so too. And it wasn’t that I did not adore all flowers, because I did. But in my mind, if one flower could have that special je ne sais quoi, then these flowers would be it.  

But as beautiful as they were, they made me sad. They were fragile and mysterious, and they were the colour of a lover blushing in winter. The trouble was, I knew they were dying. Sure, this was normal. Sure, more of them would bloom. But it seemed wrong, and I did not know how to admire them without acknowledging their slow decay in the translucent vase tied with a satin pink bow. 

And interestingly enough, I had never heard a flower complain. Not at being cut, not at being admired briefly, not at being discarded. They were simply, it seemed, resigned to Nature, resigned to their own silent beauty.

On the opposite end of the telephone, my mother was laughing; she didn’t share my melancholy. Maybe that was because the flowers had already revealed their secrets to her, or maybe because their deaths weren’t really all that sad. Maybe they were just pictures of life; beginnings, endings, and everything in between. Maybe the lives of flowers were actually complete–from the unopened bud, to the awestricken opened bloom, to the falling of its petals in humbled spaces.

I hung up the phone. Was I actually drawing lessons from the ostensible death of my still-very-alive bouquet of flowers?  Was this even normal? I did not really care. I had just encountered a Ranunculus bouquet that could speak to me without having ever said a word. 

Lesson no.1: 

1. Sometimes silence is more revealing than words. 

2. The highest form of beauty is the inability to be cruel. 

3. Gratitude improves everything it touches. 

4. If complaining isn’t for flowers, it isn’t for you.

5. Everything in life holds a lesson.