What Returns Cannot Be Stopped

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

The flowers fall. We gather them or let them scatter. Either way, the green comes back. This is not consolation; it is fact. The bulb beneath the soil does not wait for permission. It does not check whether we are ready. Spring arrives in its own time, indifferent to our cutting, our planning, our small attempts at control. There is something clarifying in this. We can tend what we tend. The rest will tend itself.