I’m still as fond of the vacuum in time created in these last days of a year, these in between something days that I adored as a child because they seemed everlasting and were abundantly filled with fun and games, but I lost the enthusiasm I then mustered for those wide-ranging lists of retrospects, those cold surveys of the not yet past, frantically trying to grasp what happened by simple enumeration. The exceptional circumstances of the past year however will undoubtedly give cause to persistently looking back and refer to its remarkableness in many ways, as well as raise the bar for next year’s hopes and expectations.
My personal spotlight shines exuberantly on the aha erlebnis, the vision change that freed me from being submerged in the loss and sadness I don’t even truly recollect or want to draw any attention to anymore, being a satisfying abdication of misery. The ability to connect to my private universe of stories and hymns, the words, this verbiage, is equally overwhelming and unexpected, cherishable and a true life-changer.
Never before have flowers so compellingly invited me to speak up and tell their tales of interconnectedness, or never before have I listened carefully enough to latch onto their voices. Now, if see this Hellebore’s splendor, despite its beauty owning up to a history as grim and dark as my last depression entailed, with its genus name deriving from the Greek ‘elein’, meaning ‘to injure’ and bora, meaning “food”, alluding to the plant’s poisonous nature, I can actually visualize in that moment the daughters of Argos’ king Proetus wandering in the wilderness, believing themselves to be cows, mooing, abominable in sight with bald heads covered with purulent wounds, their insanity manifested as hyper-sexuality, which spontaneously sparks my own lunacy to link this legend to a previous venture of our own, regularly quoted before.
Without taking away anything from the enchantment of this wonder but instead adding to it, full disclosure forces me to confess I ran into this one at our local garden center, finally visitable again thanks to the end of this year’s covid confinement, enabling the magic to reach beyond our p’tit domaine.
