It is Friday

Hi friends! This was one long week! I didn’t think we’d ever get to Friday. But we made it! Friday is here!! Fridays are casual Fridays here at Adulting – Second Half. On Friday, I list three favorite websites, songs, items, foods, etc. and I strongly encourage my readers to share their favorites in the Comments section. For more favorites, please check out previous Friday listings. Here are my favorites for today:

Chom-Chom – What can I say? Chom-Chom is the bomb-bomb! I love my Chom-Chom. We have two dark fabric couches that my dogs love to rub their backs on. They think that our couches are their own personal back scratchers/dry-you-off-rs (particularly for Ralphie, the ever swimming Labrador) I have never found a better pet hair remover than the simple, yet very effective Chom-Chom. I got mine on Amazon. By the way, isn’t it fun to say Chom-Chom?

Cherries – I bought my first cherries of the season just the other day, and despite buying pounds of them, they are almost already gone. A bowl of cherries in my house is almost as cherished as a bowl of Doritos. I LOVE cherries!!! I know that there is this old wives’ tale that says something about eating too many cherries will hurt your stomach, but that came from the same people who told you that swallowing a cherry pit would result in a tree sprouting in your gut. Ummm-hmmm. Keep eating as many cherries as you want, friends. You can’t get them all year round, unfortunately, so get ’em while they’re hot.

Schwan’s Food Delivery – I guess an upside to this whole corona mess, is that I have tried things that I have never tried before, and this includes Schwan’s food delivery service. I have found their Signature series fish (salmon and mahi-mahi) to be delicious and really nice-sized portions. When I can get my family to eat fish and even ask for more, you know that it is good stuff. The delivery people are very nice and come in that retro 1950s type refrigerated truck and they always wear masks.

Have a great weekend, friends!!! Let’s end with a giggle:

Just gonna put this out there now: nobody wants a 2020 “year in review” post (Betches – Instagram)

That’s What We Are

I recently ordered this African Bongo Djembe drum from Amazon. I love it! So does Josie, our collie. I have participated in a drum circle maybe a dozen times in my entire life. The last time I did it was probably over a year ago. I was having dinner with a friend and a drum circle was happening beside the restaurant where we were eating. After we were done eating, my friend and I walked over and impulsively joined in the pulsating circle. It was so fun and relaxing and meditative. Drum circle people tend to be very giving and inclusive, so I have always borrowed other people’s drums. This next time that I am able to safely join in a drum circle, I will now have my own drum to use and my own drum to share. I bought the drum as a reminder of things to look forward to, and as a reminder to keep expanding my interests and to keep following my whims. When I do this, I am truly living life and enjoying it, at its highest level. I can’t join a drum circle right now, and I certainly can’t borrow or share drums right now, but I am looking forward to times when I can do these things which speak to the most innate, instinctual parts of myself. In fact, I have been practicing a little bit with my new toy with this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkwCvjpVPGg

You don’t really need a drum to do a fun drum circle. When my kids were younger, we would do drumming around a fire, with pots and pans and hollowed out oatmeal cartons. What I like best about drumming, is losing yourself in the rhythm. You start out self conscious and embarrassed (I don’t have a natural musical bone in my body), but before long you lose yourself to the freedom and joy of the heartbeat of your life and those lives around you. Drumming is contagious, but in a really good way, quite the opposite of the coronavirus.

10 Inspiring Quotes From Famous Drummers

Just U and I

There’s been quite a bit of talk about contact tracing and how important it will be, to keep the tide of new coronaviruses cases low, particularly now that we are reopening our states, at a rapid pace. Johns Hopkins is offering a free on-line course teaching people the skills needed to be a contact tracer and the link for that course can be found right here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing?edocomorp=covid-19-contact-tracing

I read that many states will be hiring thousands of contact tracers and therefore, many people are taking the course. Even people not particularly interested in actually becoming contact tracers are taking the course in order to learn how the contact tracing will work and how it will help slow down coronavirus infections in our communities. The course takes about 5-6 hours to complete.

Contact tracing uses a variety of people skills and sleuthing abilities to get in contact with as many people as an infected person may have passed the virus to, in order to convince these people who were possibly infected with the coronavirus, to get tested and to also, self-quarantine. Apparently the job takes a fair amount of people skills to wade through a sick person’s mistrust and fear and need for privacy, in order to be able to help the person currently infected, and all of those others who might have come in contact with the infected person. Since a lot of the work is done by telephone, and many people typically don’t answer unsolicited phone calls, the work can be very frustrating. Still, if you are a people person, and inclined to do sometimes tedious detective work, it would probably be quite fulfilling to do a job that quite literally, helps to save lives.

30 Best Life Saving Quotes and Quotations About Saving Lives ...

Just a Blip

It’s a dark and quiet and still morning, here at the house. My husband and I are the only ones up right now, working at our computers. It looks like it will be a rainy day today and for now, that sounds delicious. I have lit several candles and we have minimal lights on. Our dogs are back into deep slumber, after finishing their breakfast. It is so wonderfully peaceful. I hope that you all are experiencing the same calming peacefulness that I am feeling in this moment. I am bathing in tranquility.

I have mentioned before that I love to read Spirituality & Health magazine. The May/June edition of this year, is particularly good. I started ripping out pages that touched me, as I do with all of my magazines, until I realized that I was ripping out so many pages of this edition, that I really just need to keep the entire magazine, intact. Rabbi Rami Shapiro and I share most of the same ideas about spirituality. He answers religious/spiritual questions in every edition of the magazine and his answers are always so wise and compassionate and thought-provoking. I really like his answer to this question: “We humans are nothing more than a blip in the infinite expanse of the cosmos. Why do people matter?”

Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s answer:

Think of the 26 letters of the English alphabet. These letters are the smallest component of this column – just a blip. Yet without letters there are no words, and without words there are no sentences, and without sentences there are no paragraphs, and without paragraphs there is no column, and without this column there is no paycheck, and without paycheck there is no food, and without food there is no me, and while I am also a blip, I matter – at least to me, my loved ones, and my creditors. So, while it is true that we humans are just a blip in the cosmos, without blips there is no cosmos at all.”

We blips matter. Shalom, rabbi.

Sunday Soul

Here’s some fun for you to do really quick:

Go to Google. Type Wizard of Oz. Click the red slippers. Click the tornado. You’re welcome!

Did you have fun with that? Here’s some more fun. Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, I publish a poem that I have written or that someone else has written and I strongly encourage you to publish your own poems in the Comments section. This is not a critique session, it’s free-form flowing of words. Honestly friends, today the poetry just isn’t flowing for me, but I found this cute poem. I think that it’s funny. Sorry, I don’t know who to attribute it to, because the poet definitely deserves some kudos for bringing smiles to faces:

I Wish I Were A Glow Worm | Words, Quotes, Funny quotes

If you want to see a great attempt of my poetry skills, please see previous Sunday posts! Enjoy some sunshine today, friends! The sunshine is the magic medicine. There’s a reason why we call it “Sun” day!

Paved Paradise

Beautiful Flowers - Picture of Rotary Botanical Gardens ...

We have a little narrow flower bed in our back yard that is sort of a hodge podge of plants that didn’t do well in the front of our house, or in other more notable flower beds and planters around our house. We plant these failing, limp little greenies in this back bed, by a small lake, in hopes that they get revived. We got the idea from our local Home Depot store. They have a flower bed in an otherwise hot and cracked and ugly parking lot, that is filled with plants that didn’t sell. And honestly, both of these flower beds are among the prettiest groupings of plants and flowers that I have ever seen, other than in fanciful, public, well-tended botanical gardens. The flowers in our back bed and in the Home Depot leftovers bed, thrive and bloom and burst with all different colors and shapes and sizes. They aren’t particularly planned out arrangements, but the mixture of all of them, reaching to the sky and showing off their blooms and green finery, is stunning. The plants scream “I’m Happy!” Invariably, the plants and flowers which we put into our back bed, thrive better than any other plants that we care for, inside and outside of our home.

It struck me the other day, that through this whole coronavirus situation, a lot of us have been thrown to “the back beds” of our lives. But the interesting thing is, I would be willing to bet that we all have gotten a few “happy surprises” and insights about ourselves and our lives. We might find that there are some aspects of being in the back bed that have really helped us to truly thrive, maybe even in some ways, better than ever. In my own family, my husband has worked from our home, instead of an outside office, for the first time in his thirty years of working on his career. And he likes it. My mentees have mentioned that online learning works better for them and they feel like they are learning more, without distractions. Friends and family have all noted that the less rushed pace and the no longer filled up calendar pages, have really helped with catching up on much needed rest and contemplation. We all seem to hope to keep more open space in our lives, even after this virus situation corrects itself. I have found myself rediscovering some very comforting corners of my own house, with pretty views that I never took the time to notice before. My husband and I are in the beginning stages of contemplation of what and where our empty nest should look like, once our daughter goes to college in a couple of years, and this virus situation has really helped narrow the field. Despite sometimes being intrigued to try city living (we’ve always been suburbanites), we realized, through this situation, that it is an abundance of nature which really soothes our souls. A big city is no longer a draw for us, in retirement. In fact, we’ve even been tossing around the idea of a more rural way of life.

Most of the plants which we attempt to heal and to revive, in our back flower bed, come back with a flourish. Sometimes we do end up re-planting the renewed bloomers back in other parts of our yard, but many of the once withering plants, end up staying in place, in the back bed by the lake where they were restored. They stay where they were healed. They bloom where they are planted. And their beautiful rejuvenation is a glorious sight to behold!

How To Let Go

Friends of mine were recently sharing together on a text chat that this whole coronavirus situation has helped the aging process, happening in us middle-aged women, to move along quite exponentially. Talk about adding insult to injury! I feel like I am taking the Advanced Placement Menopause course, as we mostly shelter in place. I don’t know if this “uber warp speed aging” is actually happening, or I was just too busy to notice before. Plus, regular salon visits, pedicures, and spa days, went a long way in keeping the whole aging process at bay, or at least a little more hidden from view. Truly, though, if we are honest with ourselves, stress wreaks havoc on our physical bodies. And I think that we can all agree that our stress levels are climbing right along, in tandem, with the coronavirus case growth charts.

I’ve been reading some materials lately about how to best deal with our stress and emotions, through all of this. We women, have a tendency to not only feel, intuit and take on our own stresses, but we often open our own tender hearts to feel, intuit, and take on the stresses of our families, our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, our pets, our community workers . . . . you know the drill. We women especially, often get overloaded with emotion and often, we don’t even realize it, until our unprocessed feelings show up in our bodies, in the form of ailments, injuries, exhaustion, exponential aging, etc. So what’s the best way to deal with this swirling cauldron of all of these intense feelings??? The answer is to feel them. As a wise person once said to me, “Don’t fix your feelings. Feel them.”

There’s a method to allowing yourself to feel your feelings, without getting overwhelmed. Worrying about getting overwhelmed with emotion, is why so many of us avoid the healthy experience of just feeling our feelings. We are afraid of losing control, but the irony of it is, when we don’t allow ourselves to feel our own very natural feelings, we have lost control. What we resist, persists. The feelings and emotions that have not been allowed to be accepted, to be felt, and then finally to be released, remain in our physical bodies and our mental states, and they come out in different ways, such as an over-reaction to a slight, or migraine headaches or a shutdown mental state where we get so numb that we can’t even feel all of the good feelings, which are also a very important part of our daily existence.

Many of us middle-aged women have had, at least, one or two experiences with yoga and/or meditation. The idea behind these lovely practices, is to calm your system down to the point where you are very much in, the actual present moment. You are very in-tuned to yourself right in that very present, now moment. In these slow, deliberate states of being, you are able to notice things about yourself. You notice your own thoughts, and you notice all different sensations in your body. This process allows you to see, that in actuality, the most peaceful, centered part of yourself, is the wise presence inside of yourself, that is able to notice your thoughts (without judging your thoughts, or at the very least, your wise presence just also notices your judgment thoughts). Many spiritual people believe that this very peaceful, centered, Awareness part of you, which just lovingly notices and experiences your thoughts and your sensations in every moment, is the real You – your spirit, your God within. The idea of Oneness comes about, when it dawns on you, that every living thing has this very same loving, peaceful, Awareness within, and all of the rest of it – the body, the ego mind with its judgments and preferences, the individual external experiences, are all really just fluff. The rest of it (the fluff), is really just tools and vehicles that give us the ability for the real part of us (spirit) to have this Life experience. In that sense, God is the Ocean and we are the waves. Everyone carries the Universe inside of themselves.

So with that in mind, just like we notice our thoughts, or notice pain in our body, we can also just notice our emotions. Feelings are natural. There is nothing wrong with having thoughts and feelings, even the ones that we label as “bad.” We will only ever be held accountable for how we act on our thoughts and feelings. Feelings and thoughts are nothing more than energy that is part of the natural process of life. Every human has all sorts of thoughts and feelings going on, all day long, every day.

Interestingly, we humans typically do three things with our emotions. We either suppress/repress them, in other words, trying to deny that we have them, because we have judged these feelings as negative, and we want to disassociate ourselves from the “badness” of them, or we try to escape from our feelings, often with addictions like working, TV, alcohol, drugs, eating, etc. or finally, we express our feelings by venting, over-rumination, over-analyzing or dumping them on to someone else. In none of these cases, do we just let the quiet, peaceful Awareness part of us to just relax into the experience of just feeling our feelings. If we can sit with our emotion, we can just notice it. What thoughts are flaring up with this emotion that we are feeling? What body sensations are happening to us as we “feel our feels”? Remember, what we resist, persists. But if we sit with our emotion, realizing that a particular emotion will be like a wave that comes in, crests, and then flows out, it becomes, really no big deal. And a felt feeling doesn’t leave residual “stuff”, for our bodies and hearts to have to carry with it, like a big heavy load of baggage. The feeling is felt, and then, the feeling is let go.

Now realize, because many of us middle-agers have spent a lot of our lives, stuffing our feelings, avoiding our feelings, denying our feelings, judging our feelings, analyzing our feelings, intellectualizing our feelings, projecting our feelings – basically doing everything but actually FEELING our feelings, there is a pretty big reservoir of unfelt/unaccepted/unprocessed emotion in many of us, that we carry around with us, all day, day in and day out. I have heard the stored unprocessed feelings, to be likened to a giant Olympic-sized swimming pool, or to a huge pile of coal. So, in particular circumstances, say for example, unprocessed anger about a very unfair job situation that happened ten years ago, part of that reservoir, that giant pool of stored emotion, will often spill out in say, an over-reaction to someone cutting you off in traffic. In that case, when that anger flairs up, you give the other driver the finger and you stew in over-sized annoyance or you carry a grudge all day about that driver and you let that incidence color your entire day. But if you are being aware of your thoughts and feelings on a regular basis, you probably start realizing that your over-reaction to being cut off is probably more about a lot of unprocessed anger, in you, about a lot of other stuff. In this example, you are just expressing your emotion, but you aren’t really allowing yourself to just feel the anger, to accept the emotion without resistance and judgment, and most importantly, by not feeling and accepting the anger within you, you can’t get to the point of being able to then, let the anger go. Instead, you have just added more drops of water to the Olympic-sized pool of stored anger energy, that you haul around with you every day. You cannot let go of a feeling until you actually have allowed yourself to feel the energy of the emotion, without judgment, without analyzing it, and without guilt. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the natural feeling, that unprocessed feeling becomes another pitcher full of water or another lump of coal, in the already heavy load of cargo that we’ve been carrying around with us our whole lives.

Now keep in mind, even the most enlightened among us, probably still have some stored-up, unfelt emotion about past events in our lives. Working through the feelings, and being able to feel pools of emotions, whether they be kiddie pools or water parks or piles of feelings, whether they be ant hills or mountains, takes time and it takes energy. Often, there is a guilt or shame feeling, about having our other feelings that must be felt and experienced and accepted and let go, prior to being able to feel the original feelings of say, anger or jealousy or resentment or pride.

I bring all of this feeling work stuff up, because I am trying to avoid adding to my own pools and adding to own my piles of unprocessed feelings, with this very scary, fear laden situation that we have going on in the world, with this awful virus. I have been trying to do this process of just letting myself feel my feelings, whenever they come up to my conscious, so that I am able to accept them and then, I am able to let my feelings go. This process helps me to come to the end of a day, with a relatively even-keeled sense of peace and it has helped navigate me, to areas where I really need to focus on cleaning up some pretty big piles of unfelt/unreleased emotion, when I am ready to do that process. Give the “feel your feelings” process a try. Start with little feels, like annoyances with people standing too close to you in the grocery store, or disappointment about a cancelled event. Feel the annoyance, feel the disappointment. Notice, with detachment, the thoughts and the body sensations that arrive with the feelings of annoyance and disappointment, and then notice, surprisingly, how quickly the emotion goes back out from the shore of your presence, back out into the big arms of the ocean of peace. Let go and let God, “they” say. What could be better?

The Virtue of Patience

Cute Pictures of Kylie Jenner and Her Daughter, Stormi | POPSUGAR ...

When I fire up the computer every morning, I like to check out Twitter to see what is trending. This morning, there was yet another clip, trending hard, related to the Kardashian clan. I’m ashamed to say that I instantly put on my cynical, snarky hat right away, as I pressed play on yet another LOOK AT ME “Hollywood brat” video. This video was depicting, the young mother, Kylie Jenner teaching her little toddler, Stormi, about patience. She left a giant bowl of candy (they kind of look like designer M&Ms), right in front of the little girl, and then Kylie, the gorgeous, young billionaire mom, said that she had to go to the bathroom. (For those of you who don’t know, Stormi’s parents are Kylie Jenner, a 20-something make-up mogul billionaire (yes-billionaire), and her father is Travis Scott, a rap music megastar.) When Kylie got back from going to the bathroom, she told Stormi that she could have three pieces, out of the giant bowl of candy, sitting right in front of her. But, she had to wait for her mother to return. Stormi nodded, showing that she understood the directions from her mother. Kylie then leaves little Stormi, in her adorable outfit, on a beautiful designer couch the size of California, seated right in front of a giant bowl, of designer, color-coordinated M&Ms. The audience watches the little girl hemming and hawing and keeping a good, constant eye on the bowl of candy. At one moment, Stormi wraps her arms around the bowl, as if to hug it, or perhaps to just dive into it, like our dog Ralphie does, with his food bowl, every night when he is fed, but the teeny, tiny, adorable toddler stops herself from her own impulse. Instead, she sits back on the couch, and starts singing to herself, a sweet little song about patience. When her mother returns, she claps excitedly about finally getting to eat three little pieces. The two-year-old little girl did better than I would have done, even now, and she is only two! I personally would have done the Ralphie dive right into the candy bowl, probably from the get-go and I certainly wouldn’t have stopped at three pieces.

Some things stick with you your whole life. This video on patience reminded me of one of those things. When I was just a young kid, a friend of mine taught me a little song which she had learned at Vacation Bible School and it stuck with me. I never forgot it. I sang the song to my children (despite the eyerolls) when they were little ones. It goes like this:

“Be patient! Be patient, for God is patient, too! And think of all the times that God has had to wait for you!”

It struck me that little children and little songs have a lot to teach all of us. We are all going through an enormous lesson in patience with this coronavirus nightmare. We can do it. We can weather through this storm. As a darling little two-year-old shows us, patience, as hard as it is, has already been programmed into us. We have the ability to be patient, even if we have to remind ourselves, with simple, little, catchy tunes. Sometimes we just have to be reminded of the fact, that we are able to remain patient, in the simplest and in the most heartwarming of ways.

Famous Quotes About Patience | Patience Picture Quotes, Famous ...

The Prisoner

I remember watching a movie, decades ago (sorry, I don’t even remember the movie’s name, I really just remember this one particular scene) where an old-timer, who had been in jail for decades, was finally released, having finished up his time spent in punishment for his crime. The former prisoner even had a job as a bagger in a grocery store, and a small, but clean apartment, all set up for him, upon his release into society. The problem was, however, that the man had become so institutionalized, that being in the outside world, overwhelmed him. It scared him to death, to be free. So, the prisoner ended up committing another serious crime, soon after he was released from jail, so that the police would have no other choice than to lock him back up. The prisoner, it turns out, preferred to be in jail.

The memory of this movie came back to me recently, as the world is slowly starting to open back up again, after our several weeks long, quarantine. As hard as being quarantined was, it was very simple. Unless you were an essential worker, you had to stay in your house. Going to the grocery story was your only outing, and you were to do that, for as limited amount of times as you could. And if you were lucky, like we were here in Florida, as long as you used six feet of social distance, you could exercise outside as much as you liked. These were the rules, and most of the people in the entire world were voluntarily united, in following these exact same rules. It was not easy, but it was quite simple. There were very few decisions to be weighed and to be made.

Now life is about to get complicated again. The coronavirus is not gone, but our freedoms are starting to open up again, and in some places, quite widely, with more and more openings, every single day. I’m not here to debate whether this is a good thing or not. I don’t have that answer. I can easily empathize with both sides of this argument. What I am noticing and what I am choosing to write about (and what brought up my memory of the prisoner in the movie) is a growing anxiety in myself, about all of the freedoms and choices that are becoming more and more available, every single day. Where I live, beauty salons and barber shops are opening back up today. And that thrills me and it terrifies me, all at the same time. Everything that every member of our family, (meaning the five of us who live here together, at our house), decides to do, has to be a calculated decision, considering all of the risks involved. And as the heads of household, my husband and I get to dictate what risks are worth the rewards, for any of us. And we have to be fair about it. If one kid gets to go to a graduation get-together, than the other two should be able to go to their friends’ celebrations, as well. We all desperately need to be personally groomed (including the collie), but is this really the time to do it, yet? Is possibly getting the coronavirus and spreading it to the rest of the family, worth the price of vanity? Should I reschedule my daughter’s dental cleaning that I had canceled less than two months ago, for now? If not now, than when? And don’t we need to support the livelihoods of the professionals who have been mainstays in our lives, for years and years, especially if we want to be able to partake in their services in the future? None of us want to contract the coronavirus personally, for certain, but also, we don’t want to inadvertently infect the elderly and more vulnerable members of our community, of which there are many. Every choice that we make, about just about anything, that any one of us in the family chooses to do, outside of our home, equals exponential exposure to the virus, a disease that still has a lot of mystery and unknowns attached to it. We’ve reached a point in the cycle of trying to contain the coronavirus, that we have to consider the struggling economy as well, and we, as a large, consuming family, play a big part in that very real scenario, as well. Venues are opening back up, almost as quickly as they first shut down, and every choice which we make, carries a lot of weight. Choices that used to be almost robotic, now can have very serious consequences. Nothing can be taken for granted, anymore. This is all more than a little bit overwhelming. The coronavirus quarantine was never easy, but it was simple. Now we are back to “not so simple” and “not so uniform”. Things feel a little murky out there. It’s still very emotionally raw. And it’s more than a tad scary. I guess that I just have to be brave and sensible, to the best of my own abilities, on a daily basis, as we all trudge forward, towards the faint light at the end of this dark, fearsome tunnel. And during this journey, I have to be kind to myself and kind to others, as we all deal with these difficult dilemmas, and make our own best decisions, as we all make our way out, to the light, together.

I Spend an Insane Amount of Time Wondering if I'm Doing It Right ...

Soul Sunday

Mother's Day Salute to Stepmothers | Happy mothers day meme ...

Thank you, Mom, for bringing me into this world and raising me. Thank you to my mother-in-law for raising the man whom I adore. Thank you to all of the women and female forces in my life, who have helped to mother me, and to nourish me, and to protect me, and to help me to evolve to become even more of me. Thank you, my beautiful children, for allowing me to be your mother. It is my greatest privilege and purpose. I am filled with love and gratitude and awe for all of you.

Readers, Sundays are dedicated to poetry here a Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, we share poetry. I share a poem that I, or someone else has written and I love it when you share your poems in the Comments section. Poetry gives us freedom in words. The rules are loose, the emotion is at the surface, and yet mystery flows. There are no critiques here. We are just sharing our intimate selves through word song. Try your hand at poetry. It’s asking to be released from your heart. Here’s my offering for today:

The Bouquet

The bouquet has been delivered.

It’s in your hands. It’s in your care.

The blooms are so easy to love, yet there are some thorns to contend with.

Underneath the facade of it all.

In the right light, the bouquet looks so lovely, so perfectly, harmonically put together.

A song in a vase.

Yet sometimes it’s a tangled mess.

And it fades and withers and drops leaves.

It was never meant to last forever,

but if you hold on to the cherished moment . . .

the time when the flowers came into your arms, and you couldn’t stop

lovingly gazing at their beautiful sight.

You remember that their blooms came from seeds,

And the seeds hold all of the mysteries of Life.

And the blooming never ever ends, even when the vase is empty.

The blooms carry on in infinite fields of color and growth,

Season after season after season.

The bouquet was just a captured moment.

A reminder of what is eternal.

Love.