“May, more than any other month of the year, wants us to feel most alive.” —Fennel Hudson

Sit with awareness of the place where your body makes contact with the ground. Press down, as if rooting into the earth. Lift up through your spine, as if a stem, rise up. Sense the structures that surround and support your heart. Go inside. Breathe to bloom. Breathe to soothe. Like a flower, bloom. Like a flower, soothe. Take your heart as a light-filled field extending out in all directions beyond what the sharpest eye can see. Take your mind as the sky, matching in vastness, beholding the flowers that grow up in the field of the heart. Love, kindness, friendliness, compassion, joy, beauty, grace…these are the flowers.

Centering words along these lines have guided us many times in the month of May, a month I’ve dedicated to the theme of “backbends and blooms.” Midway through the month I stumbled into the research of Behavioral Scientist Nancy Etcoff. She conducted a study, published by Harvard, which focused on the effects of fresh cut flowers in our homes. The results of her study indicate that flowers in our living spaces increase our access to feelings of compassion and kindness and decrease our experience of anxiety and worry. Flowers in our homes also boost our energy, as if cheering us on. “You can do it, human!” they tell us from our kitchen counters and coffee tables.

I’ve shared a few poems to inspire us on our way through the lovely, flowering month of May. Many of you have asked for copies of the poems. So here you have them!

Kindness | by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Consider the tulip,
how it rises every spring
out of the same soil,
which is, of course,
not at all the same soil,
but new. How long ago
someone’s hands planted a bulb
and gave to this place
a living scrap of beauty.

Consider the six red petals,
the yellow at the center,
the soft green rubber of the stem,
how it bows to the world. How,
the longer we sit beside it,
the more we bow to it.

It is something like kindness,
is it not? The way someone plants
in you a bit of beauty—a kind word,
perhaps, or a touch, the gift
of their time or their smile.
And years later, in the soil that is you,
it emerges again, pushing aside
the dead leaves, insisting on beauty,
a celebration of the one who planted it,
the one who perceives it, and
the fertile place where it has grown.

Like the Peony | by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Like the peony that opens
and opens and opens,
this is how I want to meet life—
surviving the cold
then returning to bloom
again. Again.
That vibrant. That many-petaled.
Embarrassingly fulsome,
as if life just can’t
get enough of itself.
I know how winter ravages.
Sounds like a metaphor?
Truth is life cuts you to the ground
and you lose all but the roots.
Sometimes those, too.
How is it, then, comes
the chance to bloom again,
to be less master of life,
and more servant
to the life that pushes through.
I want to be fluent in blooming.
I want to trust the possibility
of sweet spring perfume
as much as I trust
the inevitability of frost.
I am so grateful for beauty,
albeit brief,
for the chance to be naked,
tender, soft.
 

The Singular and Cheerful Life | by Mary Oliver

The singular and cheerful life

of any flower

in anyone's garden

or any still unowned field--

if there are any--

catches me

by the heart,

by its color

by its obedience

to the holiest of laws:

be alive

until you are not.

Ragweed,

pale violet bull thistle,

morning glories curling

through the field corn;

those princes of everything green--

the grasses

of which there are truly

an uncountable company,

each on its singular stem

striving

to rise and ripen.

What, in the earth world,

is there not to be amazed by

and to be steadied by

and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,

my own dear heart,

full of hesitations,

questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Behold the morning glory,

the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle.

 Look at the grass.

Dandelions Bloom More than Once | by Carly Haapala

Did you know that a dandelion blooms more than once?

That its life is

open and close and

open and close and

stretch out and then

curl up,

let go and then

hold tight,

bloom and then

rest and then

let the wind carry you

open and close and

open and close.

And when it appears

that I have no more to give

just let me curl. up and rest awhile

and I’ll bloom all golden and bright and

full of brand new wishes.