Our daughter Angel was married yesterday, with her boyfriend Michael. About a year of bureaucratic battle behind that, for Angel’s Italian citizenship, then months of planning and replanning, pencilling in and rubbing out of appointments, inviting of guests and changing of minds. Weeks of menus, table and sleeping arrangements, gown adjustments. In the last days, the women swept up in a whirlwind of appointments — manicures, pedicures, leg hair (bad), head hair (good) and makeup rehearsals — while the men sat bewildered, mostly shaking their heads; while I half-heartedly tried to find the suit I was pretty sure I possessed.
And the last hours and minutes: filming of the bride’s investiture while I try to decide if I can get away with a pair of comfortable but not very photogenic shoes, sussing the sound system in the town hall, discovering that the musician can come after all, that the photographers are waiting for us in the piazza while we wait for them in the hall: guests standing and facing the entrance, the bride ready in the foyer, musicians on guard, but still no photographers….
But this isn’t the story of that wedding, which went fine in the end, and everybody agreed we should all get married more often. This is the story of a flower, or a bud: a turning, if you will… 
A month ago, I began my homework assignment, for my course in Goethean observation. Goethean observation is a way of looking carefully at plants, with love in your heart and a pencil in your hand, in the hopes of learning something from nature.
In this case, I was to choose a bud, and sketch it carefully every day until it flowered. Not only that, I was to sketch the way I thought it would look tomorrow, as well as recording my own inner processes, in the observation of the bud. “I see the sea, and the sea sees me
Like a mattutina, a morning prayer, I had a daily appointment. The process of flowering would last about two weeks, I imagined. I started a month ago. Plenty of time to finish before the wedding.
I went to our garden, under my bedroom window, and chose a Doronicum bush, alight with bloom and bud, in the dead of winter. The flowers look like daisies — a simple, naïf yellow, like a sun, drawn by a child — except that they come from a bush: a bright bush of daisies under a December sky. I chose an ordinary bud, a half centimeter of clenched fist, grey green and unpretentious. Hung a piece of string on it, so I would recognize it among the hundreds of buds on the bush, drew it every day, and imagined it for every tomorrow.
And immediately noticed how impatient I was. My “tomorrow” sketch was inevitably at least 3 days ahead. Precious little was happening. In the meantime, Angel and Michael mentally invited and de-invited and re-invited people to their wedding, including me. Things at home were tense with hope and fear. But I had my bud, every morning, a bud which I was beginning to think of as “her”.
But she wasn’t developing, I was beginning to get a little concerned. While Pia and Angel had her gown adjusted — the gown Angel had commissioned and had made over a year ago, before she realized what the Italian bureaucracy had in mind for her — I began to wonder if the bud I had chosen was somehow defective: surrounded by buds that were opening, it seemed, effortlessly, but mine was unmoved, unchanged. I fantasized about squeezing her gently, to help her along. I considered changing buds; nobody would have to know.
But I stuck with It, stuck with her. And after two weeks, I realized that she had taught me her rhythm: had slowed me, calmed me. My “tomorrow” sketches were becoming prophetic — we were meeting, this beautiful, unpretentious creature and I — sometimes you just have to wait. Pia and I talked, evenings, telling ourselves that all would be well, that our daughter would
manage the intense stress, the overwhelming emotions, that she and Michael could somehow survive their wedding day.
Meanwhile the bud had swollen, turgid: I could imagine the slightest hint of gold at the burgeoning point. I realized a “why” of her name. “Doronicum: of Gold”, also at the root of “adoration”— this simple, naïf plant is a precious thing.
My sketches became adorations: loving testament to an ordinary miracle. And yesterday, a miracle occurred. Yesterday, when my daughter and the man who loves her more than anything in the world — as they exchanged vows, under the loving gaze of the community — yesterday an ordinary, miraculous flower bloomed: opened to the sky, the air, to the world, and said “I am.”
16 dicembre 2022
Recent Comments