Flowers

The student slips his fingers through the swaying ocean of wildflowers.

'They're real.'

The master smiles. 'They're real for us. For others, maybe not.'

The student looks up at the sunless sky. The everlasting night. 'How?'

The master cups a white flower in her hand. 'They're all unique. They're all memories. They're us.'

'Their material is made from humans?'

'You're thinking too narrow,' says the master. 'These are droplets of time, sunk deep into the soil here. A whole window of perspective, a full life, crushed, pressed, and dropped. A sliver of the fabric of this universe. A brief glimpse at the thread that binds everything together. A memory of memories. And from them we see flowers growing.'

'Why flowers?' asks the student.

'Why anything?' shrugs the master. 'Because that's what we anticipate to be there. That's what we think grows from the echoes of a life.'

'Because it's full of colour,' says the student.

'And they're all different, even if a few look the same.'

Paddy Dobson

14th March 2022