I came downstairs this morning to check on the beautiful Peony that Maria had put into a vase, and I saw that it was dying, and it struck me that the flower was as beautiful in death as in life. I am understanding life. We are all begin dying the moment we are born and my challenge, it seems to me, is to live meaningfully and well in between the one thing and the other, birth and death. I was talking to a friend this morning who insists on seeing her life in the contest of the things she does not like rather than the things she does – and she has many wonderful things in her life.

I don’t want to do that, I want to do the opposite. I want to see life as a beautiful thing, through the good times and the bad. Life intrudes all the time, forces all kinds of things upon us we would not choose and do not want. I’m born in the wrong time, she said. She is a writer. I wish I lived in the time before e-books, before Kindles. And does this make life bad, I wondered? No, not really, she said, somewhat reluctantly. She didn’t really want to let go of it. I am working to see the world in a different way I guess.

Life is a process, and we choose the way we see it. I saw my dying Peony was just as poignant, perhaps even more meaningful, in the gracious and evocative way in which it was moving through life. Can flowers be sad, I wondered? Do they know how short their lives are, does it feel awful to lose petals like that? Does it hurt to go from such a beautiful thing to a wrinkled and withering thing? Hmmm… I think not, I thought. Like animals, the beauty of them is that they are not like us, they do not whine, lament, wish they lived in other times. They accept their moment, and shine as best they can. Something for me to learn from.