Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Lesson in the Daffodils

Last Friday I bought a bunch of narcissus flowers, miniature daffodils, that perhaps I'm not naming correctly. I gave the woman at the flower shack,which is open only on Fridays in the hours leading up to Shabbat, 20 shekels. She wrapped the long green stems and golden to pale yellow flower cups in brown paper and handed them to me. I took them home and split the bouquet in two, one for the kitchen and a smaller bunch for the bathroom.

For the past few days, as I sit and write at my computer-- the earthy-strange fragrance of the bulbs wafts my way. It is both a pleasant and unnerving smell. At first I think something has rotted in the vegetable basket not too far from my makeshift work station. Then I catch sight of the flowers and I'm mezmerized by their beauty and recall that the scent is derived from their bulb origins, their relatives include the onion and the shallot, so I presume.

Over the week I've seen buds come into blossom, emerging green from the stem, moving into golden yellow petals in teardrop shapes, reaching higher out from their base of the tall glass in which they sit.

Just yesterday, as I contemplated these flowers, I decided that I was, in fact, witnessing their moment of full blossom, full bloom. Each flower pushing into the next, the scent fuming from the center of the flower, captivating me from a moment of otherwise intense thoughts. As I reveled in the gorgeous wonder of these bits of nature, I realized that having reached the zenith of their growth, the flowers had served their purpose, and soon they would begin to wither, dry, fade and decay into brown paper like leaves, stripped of their strange and intoxicating scent and their exterior breathtaking beauty.

Later in the day I walked to Dizengoff Center. At long last, I entered the twice-weekly flea market filled with artifacts from British Palestine, Yemen breastplates, Judaica silver and other bits and pieces of history and human accessories.

At a Yemeni woman's table, I found a stack of postcards. Postcards from "Beautiful Palestine," images depicting the Zionists of the 1930s and early 1940s -- muscular, bronzed men digging up the fields, preparing the soil for abundant production of vegetables; radiant, ruddy-cheeked women plucking oranges from trees; a community in the hills of Gilboa dancing a Hora.

These were images of Israel, of the Zionist dream before it became a reality in the eyes of the world. But for the people living in the dream state, the actual state had already been created by their purpose to inhabit the land and make it ripe with possibility of a people's fecund future. Israel, still green in the stem, some buds moving into blossom, while other aspects of the to-be-born nation only just revealing its character to the world. There is a purity of strength, of beauty in these postcards, an innocence in being, much like that of the cut flowers in the tall glass in my kitchen.

But that sly moment has arrived in which the brown appears at the edges. The petals, the people are losing their luster. There are wrinkles and creases where once complexions were smooth. Like the flower cut from the field at the base of the stem, where the State of Israel stands now, in shallow water, shallow opportunity to improve what is, the image of great beauty ingrained in the memory, in the knowing-- that's once what we were... But the reality is much deflated, much drained of the vibrancy that once it possessed.