Deep in their roots

I have this route in my neighborhood that passes an unkempt pond. I stop every time I run by to watch the light hit the lily pads, see what's bloomed since last time, maybe spot a fish or two. It's one of those small things I didn't plan to love and now kind of can't do without.

It got me thinking about water lilies. Mine at home are white, but a pop of pink felt right for this month's painting. And somewhere between the running and the looking and the painting, I learned something I didn't expect.

A water lily starts at the bottom of the pond. All the way down, in the dark, in the mud. And it grows toward the surface — slowly, quietly, with no guarantee of what it will find when it gets there. It doesn't know if the light will be enough. It doesn't know if there's room. It just keeps growing anyway.

And then one day, it blooms. And I get to stop on my run and enjoy it.

That got me thinking about us. How we all start somewhere way down at the bottom and have to make our way up. How the growing is murky and unsure and downright messy. How there's no map for it, no promise of what's waiting at the surface — just the slow work of reaching toward something you can't fully see yet.

I lettered a line from the poet Theodore Roethke right into the water on this month's painting:

deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

I keep coming back to it.

Because I think we forget sometimes that we're allowed to be in a hard season and still be holding something. That struggling and keeping-the-light aren't opposites. You can be exhausted, underwater, unsure — and still have the thing inside you that's going to bloom.

You don't have to be at the surface yet.

You just have to keep the light.

This is the painting that's going out in July's Wild Petals postcards: koi swimming through the dark water, lily pads crowding toward the surface, that line tucked right into the blue. If you want one of your own in your mailbox, I'd love to send you one.

keep blooming,