To Touch a Thousand Flowers and Pick None

“I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.”
A line from Edna St. Vincent Millay that inspired me to write this.
How profound. I wonder: what would it be like if we could all live like this?

To touch without taking. To marvel without claiming.

Perhaps her words carry a perennial lesson for those of us who feel deeply, who love deeply, who ache to hold on to what shimmers most brightly in life.

To touch without taking is to live fully, yet it requires us to embrace the terrible fragility of all that we have — the beauty, the ecstasy, and the unbearable impermanence of it all.

It sounds so simple, yet it is so hard — to brush our fingers against the delicate beauty of life without demanding it stay.

Those who feel intensely carry the pulse of the world deep in their bones.
They laugh and cry with a ferocity that cannot be contained.
And yet, they cannot help but feel a visceral ache of longing when they wake up to the truth: nothing they hold dear is theirs to keep.

Their lovers, their bodies, their beloved creatures, their houses, their memories, even their own identities — everything is on loan and must someday be returned.

Loss is inevitable.
Time. Health. Certainty. People. Companion animals.
Financial security. Political safety. Friends. Lovers.
Trust between neighbors. Solidarity amongst nations.

The people we love, the moments that make us whole, even the selves we were yesterday — they are all destined to slip away.

Of course, we want to hold on to these things. Of course, we want our plans for the future to hold steady.

I am almost ashamed to admit how much my happiness lies solely in excitement and hope for the future.
I tremble and crumble when the sense of certainty is taken away from me.
My heart holds the wisdom that permanence was never real, yet my brain and weakened limbs say otherwise.

So yes, of course, we want to hold on.

But how often, in our yearning to fill the hollows within us, do we try to claim what is fleeting? We pluck beauty from its roots, fearing it will leave us.
And the irony is this: in our grasping, we destroy the very thing we sought to preserve.

From a young age, we are taught to plan for the future. To set goals. To chase milestones.
We live as though life is a destination, something we will finally arrive at once we’ve done enough, achieved enough, become enough.

And while dreaming and reaching can be joyous, when they become our sole source of meaning, they unleash a quiet violence upon life.

What if the moment comes when we realize there may not be a “someday”?
What if we are given the news that our plans will not hold?
What if we are finally thrown into our situatedness on earth and realize the grand plans are mere mirages, and life is nothing but a fragile string of moments?

When we are busy clinging to the clouded moon, we miss the sparkling stars.

It takes years — years of practice. Years of being an intense and deeply feeling creature with a melancholic disposition.
Years to master the art of loving without possession, of taking in joy without greed, of being present in the absence of permanence.

Perhaps the most profound act of defiance in the face of mortality is to live fully without demanding more from life than it is willing to give.

If we savor each moment, then even a short life can feel infinite.
And even a long life can feel empty if we are always sprinting past it, chasing security for the future.

I aspire to touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.
To marvel at the colors of the wind and the bittersweetness of a kiss without demanding permanence.
To make a vague plan but hold it loosely, without needing life to conform to my expectations.

Perhaps this is what it means to be fully alive:
To love without caging.
To see without consuming.
To live without clinging.

To hold hope against despair.
To accept that disappointment may rise like the morning sun,
and let it be so.

To sit with the stillness of an ordinary day,
content without the need for joy to shout.
To find solace in neutrality,
to live without the compulsion to name every moment as good or bad, right or wrong.

To touch without taking is not just an act of grace toward the world —
it is an act of grace toward ourselves.

This practice, unremarkable as it seems, reminds us:
we have not been singled out for despair.
We are not alone in the ache of watching a meteor vanishes.

And perhaps,
we do not need to devour what we love to feel whole.

Perhaps we can be the gladdest thing under the sun.
Perhaps we can all touch a thousand flowers,
knowing they will wilt,
knowing they were never ours.

Our vision may shatter,
but something in us will always rebuild — until the day we cannot.

So, we might greet loss not with clenched fists
but with open hands
as if we have known it all along.

And in one fleeting moment after another,
we weave the fullest lives possible —
unyielding and eternal in their essence.

The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.