Today’s earworm is not a song because I’m honoring the composer/performer Vangelis, who died yesterday at age 79. His Oscar-winning score for the 1980 film Chariots of Fire was a key component in the amazing story being told, so here’s the opening titles cut.
Crank up the volume.
As a liberal arts major and new military historian, I cannot tell you how much I love the story about a Canadian of Ukrainian descent who is painting flowers around the bullet holes left in Bucha. Ivanka Siolkowsky began doing that after talking with a man who had lost his son and his home and pointed to the scores of holes in the fence around his garden. In her efforts, she’s been aided by a four-year-old, painting daffodils, poppies daisies and other flowers in a kind of pivot on the swords-into-ploughshares thing.
There is so much unbearable pain, horror and ugliness in this war; tbh, in the whole world. And it's going to take so much and so long to repair all the loss. I am encouraged that anyone with a heart and a brush (no major artistic talent necessary, as Siolkowsky admits) can help to replace them with blooms, love and beauty. What would it be like if everyone metaphorically picked up a brush and did this?
You know: cultivate a space for beauty.
I confess I’m not the world’s biggest fan of
azaleas. Not sure what the deal is; maybe it’s that they’re shrubs. Although I
have a gardenia bush, and I like camellias, the rest of shrubdom is kind of meh
for me. Not that I don’t enjoy hydrangeas, peonies and azaleas, but I just…whatever.
However, this year I’ve made a concerted effort to pay attention to them. With these results, from initial bud to full-on flowering.
I’ve started taking my daily walks before I go to the office because even when the temperature is in the 60s, the dag-blamed humidity around here makes it feel equatorial. As it is, halfway through my circuit my tee-shirt is soaked and the gym towel I carry is on the wet side of damp.
And we’re only halfway through May.
Well, as you might imagine, by the last leg of
my walk I’m usually pretty much focused on getting indoors and into a shower.
But yesterday morning I passed another walker who’d stopped and pulled out her
mobile phone. She pointed to the sun breaking through the morning clouds and
declared its beauty.
She was right; it was gorgeous. And she was right to stop and appreciate it. And to remind me.
Today I’m grateful that my understanding of the beauty around me has been expanded by a friend of mine who’s something of an expert on wildflowers.
It’s kind of easy to ignore wildflowers because
they tend to be outnumbered or shoved out of sight by cultivated flowers and
shrubs. Also, in my view, they seem to be mostly small and low to the ground.
But a few weeks ago on one of my #tulipmania
forays into the District They Call Columbia, I was introduced to Virginia
bluebells, which are (as you might expect) mostly blue bell-shaped flowers. But
imagine my surprise a week or so later to discover a patch of bluebells right
down the block from me, in a park.
They’re gorgeous, and I’m grateful I now know
what they are and where to look for them.