ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 19, 1995                   TAG: 9505190046
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A15   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GWEN BEAUCHAMP
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long


A BREATH OF SPRING - THE BREATH OF LIFE ITSELF

HAS A child ever handed you a dandelion and, with innocent eagerness in pride, said, "Smell, I picked it just for you. Isn't it beautiful?"

Disregard in that special moment that the beautiful dandelion is the object of all your spring curses. Just look into the bright eyes of the bearer and absorb all the aesthetic wonder of the awakening spring world. Yes, it is beautiful. It is a magnificent creation with its sunny yellow leaves, for its silent calling captured your caring eye. It is beautiful for it brought the beauty out in you.

The beauty of all that grows is an enormous complexity that can easily be ignored in our cyber world. A tiny seed is snugly stuck in the dirt, covered, and then it just pops through the ground. What is the mysterious process that occurs to allow a seed to transform itself into a ripe tomato, a 2-foot fat zucchini, or a gloriously fragile snow-white lobelia?

Why is it that the mountain laurel knows to shed its winter blanket in order to wake up to a May morning? How does the crepe myrtle know to show off in July, yet the chrysanthemum waits its turn until September?

The process of how and why all these beauties parade their stuff is left for the botanists. The real joy is for the eye, for the response the growing, flowering gift of nature conjures from within us, for as a writer once said, "The eye is the window to the soul."

William Wordsworth expressed anxiety 200 years ago that the beauty of nature is wasted on us. "It moves us not," he lamented, because "we are out of tune." Now more than ever, it seems easy to fall out of tune by the busy-ness chasing success, achieving goals, making money and spending it. Wordsworth's words are more appropriate today, but we can be blown away if we follow his steps and let the power of Wordsworth's daffodils comfort us when we feel an emptiness. He wrote:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

Wordsworth describes the scene, and the memory it later invokes:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Only triflers would dare risk spending a microscopic hour absorbing the meditative power of a lilac bloom or a roadside daisy. Apparently, I am a trifler for I can jump right into the first spring crocus, feast on its divine entry onto the lap of the world and be amazed at all the secrets the Earth holds.

The Earth can be generous with dandelions, or quite selfish, especially where azaleas are concerned. I once tried to catch a pepper bloom in the act of becoming a pepper. I sat by the bloom for one whole day, just waiting in a "gotcha" mood. That was before I knew that during the day's hours, the plants suck in what they need to grow and do the growing at night. I decided not to shine a flashlight on the pepper throughout the night and I got the pepper anyway, but only when it was ready to present itself.

I saved all the impatiens seeds from last year that I could. They are in an envelope, waiting for the right time to be sent out to perform. The first year I had impatiens I bought six little plants, wanting to try only a few, as the year before I wasted more than $10 on uncooperative salvias. The problem was very bad soil, I was informed. Well, these six little impatiens gave a standing ovation performance. At the close of summer, they had overtaken their little square bed.

I got as close to them as I could without actually stepping into a flower. I wanted to find the seeds, hoping to dry some for next year. Imagine my amazement when I discovered where the impatiens seeds can be found. They are not in the bloom itself, but in a separate sprouting packet that ruptures on capacity, exploding and spilling hundreds of its dainty seeds on the ground.

In case it was not completely self-perpetuating, I bagged thousands of the little sacs, popping them in the envelope in order not to lose seeds in the exploding process. After removing them from the envelopes, I spread them on paper plates to dry them and I preserved them for the winter in white, sealed envelopes.

Come spring time, I upgraded their summer home. The newly planted ones sprouted within days, as did, amazingly, the seeds dropped and dormant from last year. What had they been doing all winter, covered with sleet and snow and rotten unraked fall leaves? Conditions connected for their birth. The reds, oranges, fuschias, whites and violets, all magnificent in simple, yet glorious beauty, strutted their stuff all summer.

The teasing scent of a shy rose bloom, or the wistful memories unearthed by an April lilac intensify the power of the plant. On close examination of a flower in rich awakening, one cannot escape the enormous meditative capability of a plant. Things that grow represent the continuity of nature, of which we all are a part. Plants have their season, just as people do. Our connaturality cannot be denied; we are born, we live, and we die.

Pick a sprig of lilac. Forget allergies. Close your eyes to let the spring scent float before your nostrils. Feel the cushions of the flowers with your fingertips. If you are willing, you can be taken on a meditative excursion.

The first scent of a lilac in bloom always leads me to meditate on the death of President Lincoln, for I think of Walt Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." I can clearly remember the first time I heard the poem when a fifth-grade teacher read it aloud on an April morning. The mournful tone of Whitman's words took me back to 1865, when the spring of a country was cause for grief, rather than glory. Whitman mourns, "and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring." Dewdrops on lilacs are easily transformed into tears.

Experiment with a lily-of-the-valley. The flower almost hides within the foliage. The intoxicating fragrance seeps into your nostrils, remaining a delight long after its passing. The first time I held a lily-of-the-valley it had been placed in my palm by an elderly farmer who came into an office where I worked. He was sharing them with anyone he met on that bright May morning. "Enjoy, enjoy," was all he said.

How many roses and other flowers have you pressed into Bibles, poetry books or romance novels? A white rose will always remind me of a first love, remembered by flaky petals resting in a volume of William Blake poems. A crumbly yellow rose in a Bible is from the grave of a loved one. The continuity of all things, love and death and rebirth, we touch in nature.

Peering into the insides of a flower is a search for meaning. The big question: Why? Why are we here? How did we get here? Were we once little growing things with feet planted, then plucked into life? Things that grow include us; it is through nature that we all are connected.

The majestic brilliance of flowers, even the roadside daisies, the miniature wild violets, the unadorned beauty of a budding maple, and, of course, the weedy dandelion, can wake up the dozing naturalist in us all. We can exalt in the unique shape of the dogwood flower, letting its wrinkled, mauve edges and its clustered center shock our winter eyes into focus. We can solidify the dogwood into our spring memory to call upon it during January. We can dive into the blossom to celebrate and "enjoy, enjoy." We can dance with the daffodils, now, later and always.

Gwen Beauchamp of Eagle Rock in Botetourt County is a graduate student at Hollins College.



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