Have you ever been moved by something that you did because you forgot that you did it?
I was shuffling things around the other today and found a dried plumeria that had fallen out of one of my journals. I quickly snatched it up from under the dining room table, noting to myself that I needed to tape it to the page. This flattened, browned tiny dried flower is precious to me. It came from the plumeria tree in front of my house in Kohala. Marcus picked it on our last day there and stuck it behind my ear, smiling at me with one word, “beautiful”. It lives in my journal wedged in with a rose saved from the last retreat I co-facilitated, Soft Core, also beautiful. They live together in the back of my journal, dried relics of love.
As I picked up the plumeria, I made another mental note to myself that I should write in the journal what each flower is from, lest I forget, as I have for many other preserved pieces I’ve saved, flowers and random stones gathered from around the world. I collect, and then I often forget. (Although I doubt I would forget the plumeria.) So when I opened my journal to place it back in its home, and found that I had already written little reminders identifying each flower, the date, the who, the why, I laughed at myself, for knowing what I might forget and the redundancy in the ways I know myself. And then I cried, because I am hopelessly nostalgic, but also because some previous me had already recorded the importance of these two little pieces of personal memorabilia, and I was moved by the simple, silly ways I take care of my future self.
I think about how all these quiet acts are so much of the substance that makes a life. They are the little love notes to ourselves and to our loved ones that help us write our longer love letter to this world. The peculiarities and particularities of what we like and how we like it, not necessarily the core essence of who we are but part of the signature of the ways we exist. The micro noticing of how to make something just a little bit simpler, or a way of saying, I thought of you and I am here with you, even when it’s self to self. Especially then. It’s a way of loving ourselves inside of all our exquisitely fumbling fallibility.
I am moving slowly these days. The world keeps getting louder, and I am answering with morning conversations with the jays in the butterfly bush outside the kitchen window. I go to documentary screenings at the campus theater and notice the trees as I walk around Berkeley. This is my version of a quiet revolution, a slow meander toward the next phase of my work and where my devotion wants to go. Every house is different here, each its own individual, an urban respite from the homogeneity in so many other parts of the country. Activism announces itself through windows and porch signs and every garden speaks its own dialect, and I am learning the language of this place.
I picked myself a flower today, not something I would normally do because I like to leave them where they live. But this one was persistent and this fallow season is still a moment worthy of remembrance. I was on the phone with a friend when I passed a fuchsia blossom I had never seen before, and it caught so strongly it might as well have yelled “hey!” at me. I sent a picture to my friend of the flower that had interrupted us, kept chatting and walking to the store. The whole time I was shopping I was still thinking about her, so I went back and had a little chat to ask if she’d like to come home with me. A bright new companion offers herself to the floral altar squished between pages. Now she’s moved in with the plumeria and the rose, and hopefully everyone is happy with their new arrangement.
Fuchsia. Berkeley, October 4th. On a call with Jenny, beauty interrupted us. Went back for her.
Take care of yourselves out there. Leave yourselves a reminder of love. We could all use one.