The hollyhocks beside me are swaying in the soft breezes of this summer afternoon. Their flowers stretch wide, fully open in worship to the sun. They have grown with purpose and surrender to what is. They don’t withhold their blooms, clamped shut to better their chances at remaining upright. They don’t fortify their stalks or tame their reach to increase the odds of a longer life. They bend and flail under the forces. The next strong wind may be enough to break them, but they were here when they were here. They lived. They live now and they delight me. They feed the hummingbird that came just moments ago to drink from their vibrating centre. They entice the bumblebee that hangs on to their blowing blooms like a little ship on a wild, untameable sea.
All this life so remarkable in its fullness. Limit any one of those things and the rightness falls away. Have the bumblebee hiding in fear beneath a leaf lest it get snatched up in the beak of a predator. Have the hummingbird, dulled from the red-dyed GMO sugar feeder no longer lust over the nectar of a plump, fleeting hollyhock. Have me, distracted by a screen or the worries of a day not notice any of it at all. What tragedy it would have been to miss such a thing because I was far away, in a land that never is.
There is nothing left in my life now that the wild calls have not reached. All night long the earth breathes out its whispers, calling on me to expand into this life. All day, the sun crowns my head with her radiance and the yellow swallowtail butterflies flutter before me, a procession I’m encouraged to join. “Don’t just watch us, there’s so much more waiting for you!” I am here standing in the rolling wake of life, waves crashing against my body. “Catch me if you can!”
Expand into life, old girl! Expand!
Bigger. More. Life in messy gulps over dignified sips. I want to be stronger and fuller. I want to love without protections around my heart. I don’t need to be palatable. I