How to Receive Flowers

Flowers are expensive, and they die.

As someone who has dedicated their life to not only to having a floral design business, but teaching thousands of people how to start floral design businesses, let me tell you I have contemplated this a lot. It may seem like a happy, fluffy job (and in some ways it is), but after you’ve witnessed your carefully designed work mix with exhaustion and culminate in an overflowing pile of compost, you begin to wonder what on earth you’re doing! My work is perishable. Each thoughtful ingredient selection, each intentionally placed element — every work of art wilts and turns into compost. You can make a living doing it, but for most, it’s a simple one. The floral industry is not especially or exponentially lucrative despite the high price tag on the item.

Over a decade later, I’m still here because on that day when I was exhausted by the compost pile I remembered flowers had, in many ways, been the conduit that opened my eyes to life and all the beauty that is to be found within. Beauty opened the door to love that accepted me in a place of cynicism and moved me to a place where I felt grateful despite my circumstances. Gratitude opened the door to cheerfulness, and it’s a very nice place to settle. Life is not “sunshine and roses” all the time, but that cheerful heart is the best medicine. Food is for the body, flowers are for the soul.

So when you receive the expensive gift of flowers. Remember, they are not a decorative object. They are not a waste. They are food for your soul (which is probably starving!). They are an incredibly thoughtful gesture that can lead you into the present moment if you’ll let them. Miss this and miss the gift.

When you embrace the moment it can change your life forever. Take in the beauty of the flowers — the moment — for it will be gone soon. Slow down, connect, breathe, notice — notice that in the middle of “everything else” there is goodness in the world. Look at the flowers and look again. Tuck the memory away. Study the types of flowers so when you see those pop up along the road or at the garden stand in seasons of the future you remember this time in your life right now and the beauty that was there. From beauty to love. Love to gratitude. Gratitude to cheerfulness.

Sometimes it takes an extravagant, costly, perishable gift to quiet the practical, overactive mind and wake up the heart.

May cheer fill your heart each morning, like the sun fills the earth with radiant light.

Shine On,

Kelly