Flowers bloom in spring

What my day-old daughter taught me about love

I thought I knew what love was before I had my daughter. 

Romantic love, spiritual love, Earth love, familial love. Then my daughter arrived into this world through my body—my body splitting open like a flower—and I understood love on a whole other level.

I remember the first night I had her home from the hospital. The sheer luxury of climbing into my own bed melted me. That evening the tenderness of everything made me cry. The sheets changed before I arrived. The roses left on the bed stand. The skin-soft glow of the salt lamp—the same color as the first light we see inside the waters of our mother’s body.

My baby was asleep and there was, finally, nowhere to go, nothing to do but be.

The two of us were in bed together. She was sleeping and, even though the sleepless stress of my labor had been immense, I didn’t slip off just yet. I couldn’t get enough of her face, so I tented the sheets up over us in that rose-colored light and simply looked at her.

I stared and stared until I thought I could never, would never, want to sleep again. Simply gazing at her was that exquisite, that moving, that deep.

I felt my heart move like sunshine in my chest, warm and entire as the round of a sun-drenched hill beneath your feet, like the ripple of the Earth herself, the great flanks of the great mother breathing.

It felt like my heart was bursting, because it was— it was bursting into flower.

I saw spring flowers for the first time when I was in high school. 

Of course, I had seen flowers before this, but I never saw them, not truly, until I fell in love.

It was springtime in the flatlands of Pennsylvania and I had fallen head-over-heels for a gentle, kind-hearted boy who wanted nothing but gentleness and kindness for me. 

We fell fast, like how the cherry blossoms always seem to bloom overnight. 

It was heady, and beautiful, and pure, and it covered every surface of my life like a pollen falling in sunshine.

That spring, as the daffodils came up in gold-leaf and the froth of the white pear blossoms floated over the hillsides, I felt the flowers unfolding with every petal of my own body.

I drank in the blooming, the love, the opening, and I remember realizing, with a profound shock—flowers bloom in spring.

It was so simple, and yet it rocked me. 

Flowers bloom in spring.

How had I not seen this before? 

I can still feel the electricity of this realization inside me to this day.

It had always just happened, without my noticing, without my reverence, without my awe.

But now I was seeing it, truly seeing it. I could perceive the incredible perfection of it. The unbelievable joy.

I was seeing the whole of the Earth turn over into something impossibly soft, impossibly beautiful, impossibly colorful, impossibly bright.

It was so exquisite, it made me weep. I remember laying under a blooming cherry tree, staring up into the trembling branches, and just letting the realization ripple through and through me.

All along, life had been this beautiful.

All along, the flowers had been coming.

All along, the love, that radiant pollen, had lived technicolor inside this world—and now I could see it, could feel it, opening all around me.

Gazing at my daughter on our first night home was like this. 

I stared at my child on that winter night, and suddenly there was nothing but spring.

Love like this had existed all along—I just hadn’t seen it.

A love that opens the heart of the world like a flower. That reveals the life underneath the life you’ve been living. That makes you see colors—the saffron joy of yellow. The deep bell-tone of purple. The impossible pink of a flower just before it opens.

The rose of my daughter’s tiny mouth, a bud in this face I’ve never seen before, but would know anywhere. This cherished face sleeping next to me. This face that I would throw absolutely everything away for, in a heartbeat. 

Instead of laying underneath the midday cherry tree, I curled underneath the glowing sheets and let the fierce, falling-apart, coming-together, joy-of-it-all course through me.

The reality of love, pulsing through every molecule of the air around me.

The euphoria of turning myself over like the Earth in spring to bring her into being.

The ecstasy of knowing I would happily cease to be, just so that she could continue to become. 

The rapture of seeing life so clearly, in all its exquisiteness—of seeing it, and at the same moment, understanding that you’d be willing to give it all up, every ounce of of it, so the one you love could keep flowering.

The bliss, that divine bliss, of loving so purely you’d embrace non-existence as strongly as you embrace the beauty of this existence.

It’s a kind of paradise to give one’s life wholly over to this. To love. To the thing that we call love but is bigger than any word. To the thing that brings the flowers to bloom. That pushes babies through the petals of a body. That causes us to happily lay our limbs down on the Earth to become soil again. The thing that births us and that brings us back when the body grows tired as a crocus in May. 

It's this, that we’ve always been seeking.

The this we feel peeking out from behind the flicker in our lover’s eyes. The red bird spotted in the garden. The moment your child looks at you for the first time and smiles. 

Sunshine rippling over a hillside, over water, over earth, over our hands and feet as we play outside, bare-headed and ferociously in love with being alive.

The this that, blessedly, calls us to be here in the first place—and that will eventually call us home.

My experience of this kind of love ebbs and flows with the day, my level of tiredness, how available I feel to what simply is.

But I will always remember that night with my daughter when the world became flowers again.

When I realized that love is a spring that never fades, but continues to astound us.

When I remembered that flowers exist, have always existed, and will be laid on the thresholds of our heart again and again and again—until we open.

Music for opening…