Easter is our springtime holiday of hope.  Flowers are starting to bloom and the cold spells, when they come, don’t last too terribly long.  Of course, as a moveable feast Easter can come earlier than this, but here we are, in April with brave flowers making themselves vulnerable.  The weather’s fickle, as is typical of spring, with the lovely warm days often coinciding with when you have to be at work, reserving rain and chill for weekends.  Around here, anyway, it felt like winter lasted quite a long time.  It got cold early and was gray and gloomy for much of the time.  And for around here, we had a lot of snow.  Spring was reluctant to show up.  The timing of Easter was good this year.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the flowers.

As a kid, I appreciated the bright colors, but flowers were too delicate to play with and you could surprise a pollinator with a stinger, which seldom ended well.  As an adult I see that each flower is its own world.  For perennials, a resurrection.  Last year I somewhat clumsily dug up the daffodils that some previous owners had planted where nobody could see, and transplanted them in our attempts at a front garden.  Having already sprouted, they did not like that, and they withered and disappeared.  I hoped I hadn’t killed them.  This spring they showed up, reminding me that life is persistent.  It keeps trying.  That resurrection is possible.

We could spend a lifetime studying a flower and still not comprehend it all.  We see it for what it offers to us without thinking it exists for its own purposes.  All of nature interacts and we are connected, that flower and I.  We share the planet with insects for whom it is a source of life.  And other flowers with which it communicates in ways we can’t even understand.  We have to humble ourselves if we would let them be our teachers.  Our constant narrative of being on top of nature is misguided, you can almost hear them say.  There are riches here that money cannot buy and flowers would exist even without us being here to see them.  Nature carries on.  It urges us to acknowledge that we are part of it.  Easter is a holiday enfolded within hope, inseparable from its flowers.  They may be delicate but they are also wise.  We can learn from them.