Narrating flowers

I sat outside on my building's "balcony" tonight because it was beautiful. A warm night, a glass of wine in hand, and a heart full. And I kept thinking about two things: the opening speech in the movie, Shop Girl, and a passage from Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Now, the movie isn't much to speak of...Jill and I sat there watching it with semi-horrified faces at how tedious and self-gratifying it was...but the narrator, Steve Martin, begins the film with this speech:

"What Mirabelle needs is an omniscient voice to illuminate and spotlight her and to inform everyone that this one has value, this one standing behind the counter in the glove department and to find her counterpart and bring him to her."

And I got to thinking. There's the idea that an ordinary life becomes fantastic when there is a voice to narrate--to choose. That life. Chosen. Picked out as something in the ordinary but not of the ordinary. A marvelous concept, really, and one that countless love stories have played off of since before the screen ever conceived silver. It is love, in a sense. Someone to say you're special, and then to DO...to make it so. Beautiful. Perfect. There is even a white blossom, a flower even, that makes that statement a truth...a flower in front of me to be narrated.

And to this we progress to the repeating of the self, courtesy of our dear friend Gertrude. Every person is the repeating of themselfves, and it is the job of the lover to see and love that repeating. The repeating. Ordinary, until someone gives it narration, and then it is beautiful, perfect. How is any of us beautiful, perfect? Maybe not until someone sees the repeating and calls it so--beautiful perfect expression of the self, for it is only in the repeating of the self that we are lovable--for that is the true essence of the repeating.

But what of the danger in waiting to be seen to be repeating? What if no one narrates my, or your, life? What then? Are you, or am I, valid or common, inconsequential? Special, picked out or ordinary? Does a white flower, beautiful and perfect, communicate this? Yes and no. The white flower is, " I see you, and you are beautiful." But the day-to-day repeating--those are the hundreds of choices we must make every single day to act on our own self-definition. We must first choose the big choice--to be beautiful and perfect, and then we can make those infinite tiny choices to live that, that beautiful perfection. A flower lives a short while, and it grows a limited number of petals, but each must live up to its special beauty to make its perfection. So do we. And that, dear friends, is worth narrating.