There once was a little girl who lived deep in the country, where there were lots and lots of trees and flowers that grew wild by the banks of the river and along the fields of wheat and in the close spaces of the forests. Oh, did she love to go into the wilderness and see the flowers, because this little girl loved flowers.
She loved pansies in the spring and fall, for their velvet faces and their rich smiles. She loved crocus and daffodils in the early early spring for their sunny dispositions. She loved the delicate fuschia cosmos and the sweet blue cornflowers, the wild strawberry flowers and the forest floors of ivy that bore no flowers at all. She loved the nicely elegant little carnations that her father brought home for her mother on special occasions.
But most of all, she loved the daisies, with their bright smiles and nodding heads; their clean, crisp, white and yellow petals nature’s equivalent of a little girl’s pinafore.
Now, the little girl got older and was with other girls her age and she saw a new kind of flower: a rose. And the reason she saw these new flowers called roses was because the girls her age were receiving them from the boys. And there were whispers and titters and giggles and laughter and blushes and sighs and coos and glances and sneaked kisses with the boys who gave them roses.
But the little girl got no roses. And so she began to hate roses. What good were roses? thought she, who looked at the ugly red things with disgust and contempt. They weren’t daisies. They didn’t smile at you. They didn’t laugh with you as you ran through them. They didn’t whisper cute, funny things on the breezes. And most of all, they stuck you when you wrapped your hand around them! How dare they!
Daisies were sweet, uncomplicated, unscented, simple, light, and a little wild–like she was. The roses were complex, heavy with fragrance, dark (even the white ones), fickle, wicked (like nature’s equivalent of a decadent evening gown), naughty, and a little snotty–like the girls who received them. And this little girl never wanted to be anything like them!
So why, then, did she gaze longingly at the myriads of roses being delivered hither and thither during Valentine’s Day? And why did she truly secretly yearn to be one of the girls to whom boys gave roses?
As the little girl grew to womanhood, a boy gave her roses, and she cried because she had finally received roses. But the boy went away and the roses died, and so she clung ever more to her daisies.
Another boy gave her a bouquet of every flower she’d never really cared for, and she smiled and said, “Thank you,” because that was what her mother had taught her to do. But the boy was too shy to speak to her and wanted her to be his personal entertainment for the next eternity or so, and so she got rid of the boy and his dead flowers, and she clung ever more to her daisies.
Then one day she met a boy who called to something in her soul. She did not understand it, nor did she care what it was; she only knew that he was the one for her. She did not think of flowers at all, but when the boy gave her a dozen red roses, her eyes widened. She gasped. She laughed with delight that the boy who called to something in her soul had given her roses, and she forgot that she hated roses.
They were nothing like her precious daisies, which, though still beautiful, did not speak to the facets of her personality which now mattered to her. They were the flowers of her girlhood, of her seeking years, of her innocence and virginity.
She looked at the flowers in the vase and saw them for what they were: lush and elegant, and still decadent and wicked, with a depth in their complexity that matched the depths of her soul. Their fragrance spoke to the core of her femininity, to the hidden springs from which came the power to create life. Their color spoke to the richness of her being, to the woman she had become while waiting for the daisies which never arrived.
The roses were the flowers of her womanhood, of her heart and warmth, of the elegance and depths of her soul. Of her creative power, her nakedness, her potential to be a goddess. The flowers of her true being.
©2001 Moriah Jovan