Blooms and Blood
We wait, don’t many of us, for the gloom of winter to give way to the beauty of spring. We hope for balmier weather, and the colors that sprout from the ground, some for one season, some renewing themselves season after season. We eagerly shed our own carapaces of winter coats, hats, mittens, and the like. We turn our faces toward the sun, and drink in its brighter doses of vitamin D. But seasons blur, don’t they? Sometimes, they even bleed, one into another, or one after another. That’s the confounding thing about living through enough of them. Expectations are rewarded, and dashed, and rewarded, and dashed, again and again.
Where we expect the renewal of sun, and the erasure of gray, we don’t always find nature’s rainbow. Sometimes, the glimpses we get of a brighter season are undone by an unexpected frost, sending blooms receding into the earth, awaiting a more congenial moment to reappear. So it is with humans. We poke our heads out, checking for warmth. Sometimes we find it, but we pack a light scarf or extra other layer, just in case.
In this season of spring, everything has been done and undone. I need only glance at my own arm to be reminded of how what one comes to expect can be rudely, cruelly, irredeemably shaken. I have on that arm my first tattoo, in black ink, of the Israeli national flower, the kalanit, the red poppy that covered fields in that sublime color, until that color was turned to blood on October 7, 2023. My daughter chose that flower for me, over the more anodyne options I’d been considering, when we visited a tattoo studio in Tel Aviv in winter 2024.
There is something deeply searing in the transition from blooms to blood, something that overturns the order of things in a way that underscores how the rhythms even of nature can be unmade in the most tragic ways. By man. Because it is man alone who can take what nature donates to our world in beauty, and disfigure it so. And we find ourselves again in a season of disfiguring. Especially in Israel.
Where the celebrations of spring should be front and center, war has taken its place. In too many places, on too many fronts, with too much desire for it on the part of “leaders” for whom war is a lease on political life, not a horror to be minimized, if not rooted out altogether, somehow. We have just emerged from the holidays of Pesach and Shavuot, the bookends of our nationhood, only to find that nation fracturing nearly beyond recognition. We are enemies to one another within, with too many enemies without. All of which crowds out and suffocates what should be a season of joy, renewal, and emergence into the warm embrace of something better. We have scrubbed the seasons of meaning, so their transitions are confused, bleakened, and made uglier by the day. We are unreliable stewards of what ought to be the rhythms of our world, not because we don’t know how to be, but because we choose not to be.
There are those among us for whom conflict, rage, and power are the only currencies that matter. So blooms and blood and bombs must share the same space. But blooms cannot survive amidst blood and bombs. Their colors are obliterated, their space to breathe and grow laid waste. And a season of renewal then becomes just another season of mourning.
