How Flowers are a Metaphor for Life
How Flowers Are A Metaphor For Life
Since childhood, I have used my eyes more than my mind to take in life. My eyes have always been the windows to other worlds. My darlings, that’s another way of saying I am an observer of people, places, and all things, especially flowers in bloom.
Our paths to womanhood begin with a small bud. With nurturing and positive growth over the years, the bud blossoms into a flower. After the age of 50+, we should be blooming beautifully and enjoying the fruits of life. Flowers represent this positivity.
My Childhood Interactions with Flowers
As a child, I picked wildflowers for my mom on my 11-block walk home from grade school. I did not like to look at the snapdragons my mom planted but I admired the colorful pansies and impatiens, waiting for them to bloom. I became friends with Mr. Suess, an older man down the street who cut the grass because my mom feared my dad would get a hernia!
My first connection with flowers began when I handed a small bunch of wildflowers to my mom and watched Mr. Suess. gently cultivate the soil around the pansies and inpatients. Both my mom’s and Mr. Suess’s smiles allowed me to recognize that working with and gifting flowers drives strong sentiments of joy in others’ lives.
Positivity Through Flowers
I connect to flowers because they instill a feeling of positivity within me. A positive attitude is a breath of fresh air. Admiring them in their natural habitat allows me to bloom with positive inspiration and creativity. Flowers often inspire feelings of spontaneity, peace, and wellbeing.
A woman’s life can be comparable to a mixed garden of flowers, ranging from the Snapdragon, which I personally didn’t care for as a child, to the orchid, which I have always adored. In other words, while some days are better than others, every day we bloom like flowers to some degree.
Blooming in Other Aspects
I learned from experience that not all women enjoy receiving flowers. I can still envision the day I brought my Ultimate Concierge’s mother a bouquet. She told me never to bring her flowers again because she did not like them.
By the way, darling, I loved her. So for those of you who do not like flowers, you can associate positivity and blooming power with other things in your life.
In Our Chicago Home
I always have a botanical garden of flowers and plants in their natural habitat in our homes because flowers are beautiful, uplifting, and harmonious with my vision of life: to bloom as a woman at all stages.
Our dining room includes plants in every possible place.
My apartment in the sky limits me to some degree. I have always had orchids in every room of our apartment. However this year, unfortunately, the crop was not great. I feel a void without them.
We have two huge palm trees in the dining room and a green area carpet with flowers on the dining room floor. We placed tall plants in huge Chinese fishbowls in the living room and usually have fresh flowers in our bedroom and guest room. Our bed linens contain bouquets of flower and the bathroom wallpaper similarly contains floral accents.
Of course, our coffee table continues the theme of greenery!
On the Other Coast
In California, our home is filled with tall trees–two of which are 26 years old–and every room contains orchids. Our homes are intentionally filled with flowers and trees because I need flowering greenery and the peaceful benefits it brings.
Flowers are a metaphor of the style of life I require, a mix of beauty and peace.
Seek out the Positivity
For those of you who love them, take the time to pick up a bouquet or a little violet plant at an outdoor market during the summer. It is a wonderful feeling to carry them home in your arms, cut them down a bit in the kitchen, arrange them in a glass vase with fresh water and place them around your home.
After all, only with positivity can a woman bloom.
A Story of the First Flower
During the process of writing Stories For My Grandchild, I asked my editor Kerrie if I could participate in the creative process. We bonded over the phone and even more so when we met in New York over breakfast with my ultimate concierge.
I wanted the book to include flowers because I visualized a grandmother spreading the seeds of her fertile life through story for her grandchildren as a lifetime keepsake.
The Process
My first step included researching the history of the flower. Our goal was to find a replica of the first flower in the world! And I did find both the article and a photograph from the Smithsonian.
“The evidence of flowers,” Charles Dickens famously noted, “was an abominable mystery” because they burst onto the scene in fossils that are 100 million years old. Bernard Game, a paleobotanist from France, filled in the blanks.
He classified Montsechia as a conifer because it possessed enclosed seeds, the hallmark of a flowering plant. Montsechia dates back 130 million years ago. Its pollen floated in the water, not in the air, and it embodied the origins of glorious blooming forms of flowers we see all over the world today.
I was so excited when I read the article that I sent my idea to Kerrie.
The cover of my book Stories of my Grandchild is more or less a replica of the flower. Each time I glance at the cover of the book, I see that flower as a replica of women and womanhood.
Your Flowering Life
For those of us over 50, we can use the flower as a positive symbol of what is to come over the next several years of our life, a life filled with a stronger understanding of relationships, a time for adventure and newfound knowledge as well as a time to appreciate the woman we have become with all our inward finery.
Positivity is the key to a life of continual blooming.
Fill your home with one little flowering plant like the lovely violet, or create a house full of them if that is your preference, and sprinkle textures of flowering print designs throughout your home. Perhaps like me, flowers may also decorate your journal where you record your thoughts and memories. Flowers are a metaphor for life after all!
