When I envision the very first flower opening for the very first time, I touch that space where I and that flower are one, and I open for the very first time. It happens now, in this moment: continually flowering. I feel the warmth of the sunlight on my tender petals that, until now, had been swaddled safely inside the bud. A burst of sweet fragrance is released into the world which will now never be the same. I need not have a voice, I need not be heard, I need not be seen to have transformed this experience of life for all time.
As my seeds are carried off by the wind, it is unclear to me whom will be nourished by the fruits of my flowering, and there is a gentle knowing that as I open ever more deeply, that I am opening also to my death. For the point of flowering does not begin and end with me. The point of flowering is to lend a single note to the symphony of experience, and bowing gracefully to the pregnant space from which other notes will arise.
My flowering is but a symptom of this life that is both living me and flowering through me. I may be the very first flower opening for the very first time, but I will not be the last. And each flower that opens “flowers” for the very first time, for there is never any time apart from this time, and there is never a flower that is not the first, and there is never a flowering that is not simultaneously a amplification of life and an opening to death.