My dear readers,
If you’ve been to the shop recently on a Saturday I hope you have noticed the fine musicians playing lovely music outside. I guess they’re pretty hard to miss. I hope you have also noticed that there’s a young woman named Meredith selling flowers—flowers not that she has shipped from Columbia and put a string and a tag around, but that she has herself grown in a thousand square feet of our own beloved Colorado Springs dirt. She comes at eight and stays for a couple hours, I’m sure you’ve seen her and her bouquets.
I write to recommend her flowers to you. Buying them. Not because I receive some commission, not because I am disseminating anti-International-Flower-Shipping-Industry propaganda (well, not particularly), not because I am looking for more fodder for late night email writing binges, not because I am a hippie. I write in praise of buying these flowers because they’re beautiful, and because Meredith is doing a beautiful thing growing them in our city, and actually I think doing something beautiful is kind of rare these days.
Most businesses seem to me to be money-making enterprises first and foremost, gussied up with nice-sounding ideas about building community and honoring their farmers and saving the environment and a bunch of generally meaningless bureaucratic mumbo jumbo like that. But there are others—I think you probably find this more in the old world—that feel different. You feel something in those places that isn’t all about money, but something more coherent, deep, somehow thicker, more abundant. Money feels like a second thought, a servant and not a master. The money-making schemes are all thin, but something born out of love manifests itself differently. You feel something under the fluorescent lights and surveillance cameras of Costco, and it’s not what you feel picking out peaches at Spencer’s off of S. Tejon and Brookside.
That’s what I like. I like things born not out of love of money (which is a form of disinterest in the real world), not out of ideology, not out of a mondo ego, but real interest, real attention, real passion, real love, for the real world and all its wonders.
My dear readers, it appears to me that we are living in times and structures increasingly characterized by disinterest in the real, by shrill ideologies, by naked self-interest, by wild atomization and fragmentation: the strip mall, the franchise, the absent owner, the gobbling up of the personal by the faceless, the substitution of the Person for the Machine.
Buying Meredith’s flowers, it’s true, will not “save the world.” You can buy cheaper ones from the big guys, and you can probably rack up rewards points on your store card at the same time. But me, I’m casting my vote for the people in front of me doing something because they love it, lifting our spirits with good cheer, growing something beautiful in our own back yard and for our own dark age. Holding out a “candle in Babylon.”
Thus do I entreat thee, dear readers: buy this woman’s flowers. It’s what money is for.
yours truly,
david
p.s. here’s her website