something

I’ve had this thing with yellow flowers. Both this winter and once sometime toward the tail end of last summer. Back then I had come from the Pacific Ocean, I was carrying my boogie board, a wet towel and dry tank-top draped over a shoulder, walking on Brighton Ave back to my faraway parked car. I was out in the middle of the street, which I like, and from the corner of my left eye I caught the color yellow. I turned and there were large yellow flowers on a green bush just off the sidewalk into someone’s yard, and I was literally stopped in my tracks. Stunned into stopping. There was not a single thing other than yellow. For just a few moments. I got to talk about it with a Zen teacher the next Saturday, via Zoom, as we’d been talking about “stopping”.

Since that afternoon back last summer I find myself in a different relationship with yellow flowers. Something communal. I was on a walk yesterday, what I call the around-the-golf-course walk, and repeatedly came upon abundant spaces filled with yellow flowers. Different varieties. On peoples’ lawns, wild along the edges of the road, wild on the descending sides of ravines. Each time, stopping in awareness of something like a gift from the day, again, my stopping and noticing an honoring of the day’s offering.

There’s something there for me, which may be just liking flowers. But, I think it’s more. Something about the stopping. Something about being so stopped.