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As the days of March grew warmer in the foothills, we began to forget Winter. Winter, however, did not forget us. “Spring,” we laughed when we awakened to the songs of birds we had not heard since October. “False Spring,” we sighed as our days and nights turned white and cold again.

This flower, a gift from a friend, ignored the winds and white drifts piling up against the windows. On the coldest days it seemed to grew taller. Green fingers sprouted, searching for light. Every day I contemplated it, listened to it, drew it.

Years ago when I used to offer classes at the college, I would suggest to my students that drawing is not only the act of seeing, of observing with our eyes whatever the subject might be: flowers, clouds, skin, whatever. But drawing is also an extension of our fingers, as if we were touching the subject, embracing it. What I have lately been learning from the flower is that drawing can also be an extension of our ears. During these weeks of companionship, the flower and I seem to mirror each other; I oberve it, it observes me. It listens to me, I listen to it. To my surprise, the flower sounds like it is singing.

Do you remember when as a child you first held a conch shell to your ear and were amazed to hear the sounds of the sea? The flower makes a sound like that, like a sound light would make if we could hear light. No, no, I thought, I must be mistaken, flowers don’t sing. The amazing sounds are only feathery whispers of snow piling up against the windows.

Then again, perhaps they aren’t.

“It’s an amaryllis. Why not just take a photo instead of going to all of the trouble of drawing it?”

A fair enough question. It’s difficult to imagine a world without photographs, and if I could imagine one, it’s not a world I’d like to live in. So why draw? Well, drawing takes time and requires a lot of paying attention. Your doctor has probably already advised you that slowing down is good for your health. Believe her!

Around the Winter Solstice a friend gave me a brownish, spherical thing, half-buried in dirt. I knew what it was called, but why name it? I just sat and looked at it for long whiles, especially on rainy days, as if it were something that had appeared unexpectedly from another planet.

I like drawing with a pencil and colors rather than taking photos. The slowness and deliberation of drawing allows you to pay attention, to wait, to be patient, to listen. To learn.

To learn what?

First: looking is not one-sided: it’s a partnership, a dance with what you observe. Whatever you are drawing is also looking back at you. We don’t notice, yet the world observes us.

Second: I called my friend’s gift a “spherical thing.” But it’s more than a noun: it’s a verb. In other words, it’s an energy: it’s not just a being, but also a becoming.

Third: Dancing is an energy field you share with your partner. You become a flow and it becomes you.

There’s more to share, but I’m running out of characters and spaces for this post. Besides, it has stopped raining and the world on the other side of the window is beginning to turn white.

Days of cruelty and hatred, days of fear and greed, days of gunshots, insults, tears of children: frigid days of grieving families and laughing prison guards.

Our Greek ancestors would call a time like this an Age of Iron. Such ages are only mere flickers of earlier, kinder times. Humans have “grown so wicked they will worship power; might will be right to them, and reverence for the good will cease to be.” Edith Hamilton wrote these words in a time of war, in 1940, her precursor of now, our own dark times, our wars against each other.

What to do? How not to hate those who hate you?

To celebrate long winter nights, a friend gave me a brown sphere, about the size of my fist. It had papery skin and green, blade-like wings emerging from its crown. Just looking at it helped to calm my hatred, anger, and frustration. I put it in a pail of dirt on a window sill, gave it a drink of water and began to draw it. After a few days it looked like this, phallic and vulvic at the same time.

In the next few posts I’ll draw for you how it opened itself and how I listened as it whispered and unfolded its arms.

Meanwhile:

The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers

—Basho (1644-1694)