The flowering of delight: celebrating the Season of Creation

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
~ Honore de Balzac ~

I spend much of my time immersed in flowers. So, it’s surprising that it’s taken me until my ninth annual Season of Creation post to single them out. Plenty of flower photos have shown up in the earlier ones. But this is the first time I’ve devoted both words and images to my favorite beings.

They have been my favorites since I was tiny, entranced by the violets in sidewalk cracks, the sweetness of honeysuckle. By one neighbor’s lilacs, another’s mountain laurel. A florist’s greenhouse was on my way home from school, and I would stop and wander the scented aisles. One spring, I decorated my tricycle with tulips, much to my mother’s dismay. I remember the places I’ve lived and traveled through by the flowers growing there.

I’ve always found them beautiful, of course. But flowers are far more than their pretty faces. They are the creators of seeds, one of the most important tasks on the planet. They are the miracle of fruiting, which means they power the entire breathing Earth. Those nutritious fruits eventually evolved a being with the eyes and brain to stand in awe of the radiant flowering world.

They are navigators of their place, despite not being able to move unless swayed by the wind. They prosper from a network of roots, leaves, stems, from soil full of mycelium and microbes. Their eons-old relationships with their pollinators show great evolutionary intelligence as they’ve evolved ways to propagate their kin.

Their evolution is part of the deep intelligence of the plant world. They are relative newcomers, emerging in the Triassic Era, 140 to 250 million years ago. Color followed, perhaps evolving at different times and places as the intricate dances with pollinators developed.

These ancient beings are expressions of the immense cosmic forces that shaped, and continue to shape, the universe. Like them, we are formed from the fiery birth of this planet, from stardust woven into bone and breath. Our destinies could not be more intertwined.

Our love for them helps anchor us to life. It’s one of our motives for cherishing, protecting, and fostering the green world. Their beauty stops us in our too-busy tracks, clears our minds, opens our hearts, reminds us we belong to the living world. We remember we are not outside of nature—we are a thread in its intricate web. Together, we are the story of life unfolding.

The Season of Creation started as a single day in 1989. Now, churches worldwide set aside September 1 to October 4 to contemplate the wonders of the earth. Along with what we can do to foster and protect them. Pope Francis added it to the Catholic calendar in 2015 with the publication of his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si.

I started my celebrations with quotes from this visionary document. Since then, I’ve quoted wisdom from other faith leaders, scientists, and activists. I’ve celebrated beauty, water, wings, and trees. Pairing them all with photos of the wonders I’ve seen wandering our sublime planet. For the Season of Creation 2025, I’ve chosen poetry and prose that celebrate the beauty, power, and mystery of flowers.

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Bloom—is Result—to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance

Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian—

To pack the Bud—oppose the Worm—
Obtain its right of Dew—
Adjust the Heat—elude the Wind—
Escape the prowling Bee

Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day—
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility—
~ Emily Dickinson ~

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In the night, in the wind, at the edge of the rain,
I find five irises, and call them lovely.
As if a woman, once, lay by them awhile, 
then woke, rose, went, the memory of hair
lingers on their sweet tongues.
~ Li-Young Lee, Irises ~

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And only where the forest fires have sped, 
Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands, 
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head, 
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed, 
It hides the scars with almost human hands.

And only to the heart that knows of grief,
of desolating fire, or human pain,
There comes a purifying sweet belief,
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief.
And life revives, and blossoms once again.
~ Emily Pauline Johnson, Fire Flowers ~

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And this above all: that through these petals 
light must pass. From a thousand skies, 
each drop of darkness is filtered out 
and the glow at the core of each flower 
grows stronger and rises into life. 

And the movement of the roses 
has a vibrancy none could discern, 
were it not for what it ignites 
in the entire universe… 

the secrecy of fate and the darkness of Earth at evening— 
on out to the streaming and fleeing of clouds 
and, farther yet, the orders of the stars— 
take it all and turn it into 
a handful of inwardness. 

See how it lies at ease in these open roses.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Bowl of Roses ~

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If you could enter their dreaming and dream with them deeply, 
you would come back different to a different day, 
moving so easily from that common depth. 

Or maybe just stay there: they would bloom and welcome you, 
all those brothers and sisters tossing in the meadows, 
and you would be one of them. 
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 14 ~

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I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
~ Claude Monet ~

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Found a lovely lily (Calochortus albus) … a most impressive plant, pure as a snow crystal, one of the plant saints that all must love and be made so much the purer by it every time it is seen. It puts the roughest mountaineer on his good behavior. With this plant the whole world would seem rich though none other existed. It is not easy to keep on with the camp cloud while such plant people are standing preaching by the wayside.
~ John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra ~

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A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
~ Thomas Merton, Song for Nobody ~

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But all my life — so far —
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how
the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fire of the world
and stand there shining
and willing — the one
thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
become the trees.
~ Mary Oliver, Moccasin Flowers ~

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The more I look
the more I see
the face of God in a flower
~ Basho ~

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