Read Online Feeding the Hungry Ghost by Ellen Kanner - Free Book Online Page B

box of colors, from the gentle lavender pastels of water lilies captured by Monet, to ginger’s red-and-orange in-your-face spikes and spires, which inspired Gauguin. If you’ve never evolved beyond the simple five-petal-flower-drawing stage, you’re still in luck. Loving flowers has nothing to do with artistic talent. It’s how we’re hardwired. Because botanically speaking, they are the sex organs of plants.
    Blooming flowers gladden our hearts after a cold, gray winter, but their main agenda is to attract birds and insects, to stimulate pollination and get life’s party going. While the flowers pop their saucy heads out of the cold earth, the sap rises in young trees. And in all species. Spring is libidinous, fecund, fun. In spring, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in “Locksley Hall,” “a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove; / In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” This is a decorous,Victorian way of saying in the spring, we feel the love. We feel the lust. All life forms come out of dormancy, and we’re strutting our stuff.
    Maybe not all of us. April is the cruelest month, according to T. S. Eliot (breathe — this is our last poetry reference for a while). What Eliot meant by this is that April can be a con. It’s supposed to be the month in which everything comes into flower. But then it snows. Or you wipe out walking the path that was so firm beneath your feet yesterday but that has, thanks to the spring thaw, morphed into a mud bath from which your dignity and your Jimmy Choos will never recover. It’s supposed to be spring. But you’re still swaddled in sweaters and can’t kick the sinus infection you got back in January. Maybe the weather is delightful. The sun is out, the lilacs are in full, audacious bloom, their fragrance cloying, pervasive, and migraine inducing, and everyone is pairing up and going at it, including your ex. The two of you just broke up, but he hasn’t been pining. In fact, he’s getting married (to someone else), so you’re just a mite hard-pressed to see the glory in everything, all right? So just back the hell off.
    Buck up. Spring happens once a year, but even without climate change, the rules are different for humankind. You are not an annual, one that grows, flowers, shoots its seed, so to speak, and dies. No, the really great thing about our species is we can come into flower again and again. It is a coming into self, a blooming, a sense of realizing the extent of our own incredible talents and powers.
    Say you’ve been in a holding pattern, a not-good-but-not-bad treading-water phase. Then one morning, you awake and delight to the trill of the sparrow that’s been singing its heart out for weeks, only you’re just now hearing it. You find your footingin a previously rocky relationship or at last figure out how not to crash the office’s new software system. The scales fall from your eyes; the numbers drop from your bathroom scale; your musk is in the air; your very presence seems to charge the ions around you; the gods beam down and rain prizes and presents upon you. Or at least you think, okay, maybe this has all been to the good, after all. And though it’s nothing you might bring up in your carpool, you feel your soul lift and lighten. You feel joy. Flowering is when life tells you yes.
    For me, sex is the best yes out there, any time of the year. I am a nice, married woman, but even so, desire can surprise and awaken you in odd, unpredictable spurts. I’m not talking about erectile dysfunction drugs; I’m talking about when attraction floods you for no reason, like suddenly getting a crazy-ass crush on the organic farmer at the local farmers’ market or that senator with the weird hair. It gives you a reason to smile through your committee meeting, wear lipstick, or get a haircut. It does not always coincide with the season, and hallelujah for that — I’d hate to think love as we know it has to be stuffed in