There is a poem in every flower, if the poets are to be believed. I fell into it after growing up relatively detached from nature, not able to name a tree other than palm or oak, not able to identify a flower or bird. It’s fine. Maybe a little bit of a shame. But I’ve made up for it by studying the natural world on my own, finding my way from forced learning to an actual appreciation for the non-human things that inhabit my world.
Spring here is all about the cherry blossoms. Airy clouds of baby pink flowers. Puffs of them all along the water, around our founding fathers’ monuments like beautiful skirts. Thomas Jefferson somehow made delicate — I joke the trees were planted to distract us from his immorality.
People flock to the blossoms. Whole industries flourish around their annual appearance. And then, within a few windy weeks, the flowers disappear as suddenly as they showed up. Til next year.
Here I fall into my own trap: thinking this is something poetic. Because isn’t it true these trees are still here next month? Year round they remain. And not just here, but in every neighborhood in the city, even in pots in my neighbors’ yards. One, a downward sloping Weeping Cherry Tree, shocked me with a cascade of pink. It had just been an ugly collection of thin, bare branches up until that point.
In the summer, when these trees are simple trunks and leaves like any other tree, I bet few people remember their splendor. If they could talk, they might say, just wait, you’ll see. When the light is right and the frost has passed, we’ll remind you who we are. But no. Only if they could talk and had pride like us. Felt this drive to prove things like we do.
As I walked under their fullness — me, full of my human hubris — on a clear afternoon a few weeks ago, I imagined them saying, See?
I feel like the cherry blossom sometimes. Mad at how unfair it is we only get lavished with praise when we fit a certain image: we’re putting on a big show and our product is perfect pastel pink. At our flashiest, we get the attention and accolades, and then the wind arrives. The petals of us, and what we think we are, always fall. And we’re begrudgingly back to the basics, rebuilding, filling our stores of energy so we can make another run at it next year, next week, tomorrow.
The cherry blossom communicates without meaning to some truth: Simply, our work is not just evident in the flowers we produce. The impressive stuff is almost always noticed by happenstance: the right timing and conditions, and maybe a little self-promotion. The rest of the time, we’re quietly doing the real labor of staying alive, of existing as part of a complex ecosystem we don’t fully understand.
Nothing flowers year-round.
🌸
As an undergrad, I asked to get coffee with a well-respected data visualization professor to get some advice. I was ambitious and interested in life beyond college, including how I could make it as a journalist. I don’t remember anything about what we talked about, except for one comment he made. He said 99% of what he created was probably shit, but the last 1% was great. That small sliver was what made him a reputation, and gave him a career, and made the rest of the effort worthwhile. We churn through the crap we make because it’s necessary to arrive at our best.
Sometimes, the 99% lasts a really interminably long time. Our whole lives are mostly that, really — no flowers, little acclaim, our heart’s desire unfulfilled. I struggle with this hard. The running-out-of-time panic that’s accompanied me for many years gets louder as I watch my own helpless shit-churning unfold. This is necessary, I remind myself. This suuuuucks, I reply.
And then, mid-shame spiral, something crosses my path. In December, it was a straightforward tweet from the writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
I return to it often. Abdelmahmoud, in talking about something else, wakes me up: This is not about my individual, ego-driven wants. I’m set back on my heels — humbled, it feels like, on a cellular level — as I recall what regular people have won by just carrying on. With spirit and hope. But just carrying on. It’s embarrassing how often I lose sight of it.
Among the cherry blossoms, I see it clearly: Everything good that exists was created by prayerful diligence — planting a million seeds that wouldn’t see the light of popular concern for a long time. So many lifetimes without flowers.
And now, I’m here and I get to see them, and I’m in awe at something I’d call a miracle if it wasn’t so clearly molded by people’s hands, watered by their sweat.
🌸
In a few weeks, the tourists will have returned home with a camera roll full of pink tufts. The basin will have eaten its annual meal of a million heart-shaped petals. The footpath will be clear.
And the trees will return to their honest, silent work.
Recommendations
Palestine’s Seeds in Diaspora, Atmos. A moving project focused on planting literal seeds in the midst of — in resistance to — unthinkable anguish. As I’ve said and am often reminded of, plants are political.
The Case For Marrying An Older Man, The Cut (…much to discuss).
Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control, Intelligencer. I wasn’t familiar with Huberman, a Stanford neurology professor and optimization bro podcaster, before reading this. And what an introduction. Come for the biohacker blather, stay for the ex-girlfriends storyline.
The creator of the karaoke machine died this month, at age 100.
As you know, The Bachelor bored me up until the very last episode. But I have to admit I was touched by the display of friendship between the two final women. And then, the next Bachelorette was announced after the final rose — Jenn Tran, somehow the first Asian American woman to lead in franchise history — and I’m back in. This Washington Post story on reactions to the announcement is sweet.
Obviously, listen to COWBOY CARTER if you haven’t already. I’m excited to read reflections from Black Southerners on how this album resonates. Already, it’s reclaiming something sacred, my friend Eva Reign writes in her review.
Have a great week (hat tip),
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta. To support our little homemade, hand-crafted, artisan newsletter, subscribe and share.