The Meaning of Flowers

​Today I woke up with the clearest sense of the other side of all this. What's coming back in abundance is joy. That's both the irony and the gift of a pandemic. When you survive it you learn something significant, and you'll never go back to who you were before.

The art to come out of this... the writing, the music... the paintings people have shared, it's stunning. Yes, there's the disaster of everything we know is disastrous, all of that is obvious - first and foremost the lives lost - but underneath the story of the economy and the wild mismanagement of our federal government and the fact the theaters are closed and festivals have been cancelled and everything else we all know is about loss, is that we're connecting and creating in ways that would not have been possible if everything in our lives hadn't come to a crashing halt.

I've heard the words "I love you" spoken from more people and more often than I have in my life. I'm guessing the same may be true for you. I've learned that I'm capable of leading a six or seven-hour writers' workshop, and writing myself, every single day. A marathon for me, and something I didn't know I could do, but I can. The coral reefs in Hawaii are thriving without all the dangerous sunscreen that harms them, the earth is greener, the air is more breathable, the canals in Venice, with clean water, are said to have dolphins in them (and even if that's not really true it's gorgeous to envision that), the children are singing in zoom rooms, the writers are writing the story of these days in online workshops (led by many different facilitators) and reading their work in pop-up salons.

Yes, the theaters are dark, including our beloved Kahilu Theatre in Hawaii, and the schools are closed, but students are learning online, and people are making face masks for other people and gardens are being planted and we're sharing recipes, and artists are singing online (Rufus Wainwright in a bathrobe and Martin Sexton from the road), and actors are reading bedtime stories on apps that will help you sleep.

How is this not an opportunity?

If we focus on what we've lost and not what we've found, we may as well stay in bed until we come out the other end of this. But we ARE coming out. The death rate in NYC is going down. The curve is flattening. And way more people are surviving than dying. And we're learning that the people who have survived are most likely immune to the virus.

So the survivors of this become a gift to the rest of us.

Surviving cancer changed me. Everything meant more after I didn't die... all the colors were brighter. Now I'm always looking for that light, the light you see in survivors, except now I'm seeing it everywhere.

It's hard to see joy while we're still inside this pandemic, but having survived a personal plague, I see it... the color burst at the end of the tunnel.

So here's to the many gifts to come out of this, because when we go back into the world, which we will, we'll remember them. We'll remember what was impossible, but we'll also remember the meals cooked, the slowing down, the books read, the art created, the cleaner planet, the I love you's, the ways we held each other up... the way we walked each other home. Everything we didn't have time to do before, and we'll feel gratitude.

After fissure 8 opened in Hawai'i in 2018, and all those homes were destroyed by lava, the volcano stopped erupting for the first time in since 1983. The island was suddenly clean... no vog. You could see Maui from the Big Island. Everything was more alive, more vivid. But it came with sacrifice.
 
The photo is a lava field, and even in lava flowers grow. But the meaning of flowers will have changed because it all means so much more, and you feel it in a place where you never before felt the meaning of flowers.
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I already feel it.