Seasons and Rituals in Bloom

This year, for Mother's Day, my siblings and I decided to make high tea for my mom - going all out to make the most adorable, time-intensive, miniature treats, and largey forgoing the tea part in favor of champagne. In my book this is the perfect time of year for flowers - EVERYTHING is exploding into bloom, and EVERYWHERE. The trees in every traffic island are celebrating. I returned to the house with armfuls of lilac, cherry blossom, hyacinths, tulips - and when I made an arrangement for her, I was stunned to notice it was almost exactly the same as this one I had made for her, for Mother's Day two years ago. But of course!

It surprised me to notice that my instant reaction was one of shame -that it was embarrassing, or shameful to make the same arrangement as I had years prior; that I wasn't being creative enough, or pushing my boundaries. But I realized in the same breath that it is only in recent years that we as people have attempted to reinvent the seasons. For generations, our lives have expanded and contracted according to rhythms much larger than ourselves. Forever in the book of humanity we have worked with what we had at any given time, and ritual arose as a result. What if tradition is not an arbitrary thing we create, but something that comes to roost resulting from the confines of our lives? Could it be a beautiful thing that year after year, I will make my mom a bouquet of blooming branches and bulbs I planted that return year after year? Could that be, in fact, the MOST beautiful thing?