After months of being close to home with mending bones, in early June last year, Marissa drove me out to Sag Harbor to see the exhibit of all thirty-six paintings in her Silent Journey.  On crutches and still trembling from the effort of reinhabiting my legs, I was repeatedly drawn toward the end of the series to look at this piece once more.

Marissa explained that it’s effect was from painting on handmade Wallis paper which has a fine sand surface.   As if looking at a butterfly’s final flutter, movement is what I see.  Even though the blossom is going down, and at the time, I was rising up, it was the grief and joy in this painting that exquisitely called my name.

Signed, Proud Owner of #32.

When Marissa Bridge and I came up with the weekly concept of combining her thirty-six paintings of one orchid’s bloomstalk, with my thoughts on life as I experience it, our first post, by chance, was March 21st, the Spring Equinox.  As we near the end, the  blossom’s color fades, and outside trees burn bright.

The same as many posts, today I was unsure of what I wanted to say.  In trying to come up with something, I realized that thirty-six weeks is a nine month endeavor.  The comfort in nearing the close of this commitment is the fact that both Marissa and I, together again, or alone, have new projects coming down the canal.

At thirty years old, I encountered a local writer and singer who belonged to a rock band of national fame.  Since there are no innocents in this story, names and places have been purposely avoided.  But naturally, a tale that has to do with orchids must be told.

After an hour of glimpses at each other in a downtown gathering establishment, the  writer with floppy hair and lanky limbs sauntered up and sat beside me.  In one penetrating look from piercing blue eyes, my Virgoan philosophy was about to be tested.

I was a professional horticulturist, recently separated from a marriage, first time living alone, and a wanna-be wordsmith, none of which he knew.  My ex unwittingly had starved me of communication and certainly poetry, and the rock star spoke directly to the center of my needs and vanity.

“You’re an orchid, aren’t you,” he said.  “A Brazilian orchid.”    After another beat of observation, he added,  “Cultivated, not wild.”

There are orchid plants in the forests of Peru measuring forty-four feet from the ground to their highest leaves.  In other parts of the world, they have found specimens that weigh a ton.  Orchid flowers can be as tiny as dimes, or as heavy as two hundred twenty-five pounds.

No matter how large or small, the orchid has captured the imagination.  For growers, the first signs of a new leaf or a bloom stalk peeking out from the center crevice, all the way to the end of a flower’s days, are mesmerizing.  Like human faces, each and every flower in the vast Orchidaceae family has bilateral symmetry.  I wonder if our passion for them is partially because they remind us of our loveliest selves.