Once more I have been thinking of ponds, lilies and dazzle. Or maybe more specifically, water and blooms and light.

At the ocean where the sounds of the sea and breath coincide, I saw scrubby orange Gaillardia plants and remembered my daughter’s love of those flowers. I have a photo of her standing in a bed of those flowers. She wore soft frizzy blonde curls and deep blue eyes and a Sesame Street swimsuit with orange and yellow stripes that made her blend into the garden of flowers like the best and most glorious bloom of them all.

Near the ocean, I saw the view of a pond from windows of a new house and vowed to my cousin that I’d be back to visit when she moved.

I have seen the orange daylilies that signaled summer freedom growing wild along roadways, and I will look for magic lilies this week, my grandmother’s birthday flowers still growing after many decades, still reminding me of her wisdom and fortitude and fierce love for her family, her children, her grandchildren.

In the midst of a time of quiet meditation, the cymbal crash of thunder and pelting rain called for attention. I heard and I listened. In a time of conversation, the flashes of heat lightning punctuated the words and thoughts shared.

Mary Oliver’s poem “The Ponds” that inspired memories in Ponds, Lilies and Dazzle includes these lines: “I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.”

I move toward light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaillardia or blanket flower blooms from low scrubby plants near the sea.

See more about my grandmother’s magic lilies here.