LAUGHING IN FLOWERS

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE CARRIED EVERY FRIDAY IN MANILA BULLETIN, 16 MAY 2008)


“Behold this flower. In this exists the entire universe.”

That was Deepak Chopra in Manila back in the late ‘90s, holding a single long-stemmed rose before a whole ballroom of us at some hotel in Makati. This Indian medical doctor and writer, a great force in the propagation of the New Thought Movement particularly in the United States, was then challenging us to look at the interconnectedness of life, the existence of all that was, all there is, and all there ever will be in everything.

Pluck not the wayside flower;
It is the traveler’s dower
—William Allingham

What better way to bring this point across but with the example of a flower, whose universal appeal makes it at once simple and magical, common and sublime, straightforward and symbolic? After all, any flower is as mute as it is eloquent, as silent as it is loud and clear in delivering messages that resonate within us with the impact of a megaphone. What exactly does a narra bloom stand for in the language of flowers? I don’t know, but when this tiny flower randomly fell on my windshield just when, faced with the dilemma of quitting a job I loved for greener pastures, I was praying to the Little Flower, St. Therese of the Child Jesus, for a sign—a yellow flower if I should stay or a white one if I should go—I knew exactly what it conveyed to me. It was the first ever time I earnestly asked for a sign from heaven and it was granted to me in no uncertain terms.

To me, a flower is as much a representation of the brevity of life as an embodiment of its infinity. Because of its short life span, we learn to come to terms with the fact that all things must end, that even beautiful things, joyful things must come to pass. But because after every wilting comes a season of blooming, we might be made to believe that life goes on, that there is a cycle with which we must come along, and that there is a time, a season for everything—joy and sorrow, youth and age, life and death.

In Manila, even in places where there is no space for gardens, flowers thrive. The pink bougainvilleas that adorn the aisles on Burgos Street from Roxas Boulevard appear to unfurl their petals and their color as if to defy the scorching sun. According to my friend, floral master Rachy Cuna, the less you water this survivor of a plant, the more beautiful it is when it comes into flower. Nature is magic in a bougainvillea, whose response to scarcity is beauty. I wish people had the same survival mechanism, especially in times of dearth such as now.

But other flower species paint Manila with all the colors of the spectrum. Yellowbells, gumamela, santan, calachuchi, four-o’-clocks, bandera Española, and other colorful blossoms peep out of fences in the villages everywhere or claim their pride of place even in tin cans on the steps leading to a shanty. If you’re lucky, you can drive through an almost deserted road in a village in Las Piñas under a shower of orange, the falling petals of a fire tree in bloom.
Edwin Josue, a Filipino florist who made it in New York, once raved to me during his brief homecoming how in awe he was that flowers grew almost wildly in the most unexpected places in Manila. At his shop in the Upper East Side of New York, flowers need to be flown in from places like Holland because, after all, when you walk down the busy streets of the Big Apple, all the flowers you can see are in the shop windows, especially now, when the biggest designers, from Valentino to Ralph Lauren, from Jean-Paul Gaultier to Viktor & Rolf, have all decided to grow a forest of flowers in their Spring/Summer 2008 collections.

If the great American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “Earth laughs in flowers,” was right, we can safely conclude there is happiness where we are. But how come our parks cannot be gardens full of glad tidings? How come some government official decided to cut down all the fire trees along some provincial road because they caused so much litter? How come we often fail to look up at the brighter side of things like flowers turning their faces to the sun?

I suppose that with so much “laughter” around us, we are taking it for granted how lucky we are to be happy in these very lonely times.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com.