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@ Cindy Milstein (they)
2025-05-26 01:44:37
I’ve been obsessed this rough spring with flowers, but especially lilacs. I thought it had to do with their ephmerality—bittersweetly mirroring how uncertain and precarious everything feels, which in turn highlights all that we love and fear losing.
Randomly, I just learned that lilac bushes can live for hundreds of years, are incredibly hardy despite their fragile scent (which in turn, has a calming impact on stress and anxiety), and not only symbolizes love but also has been used in mourning rituals.
Lilacs, even if they have no need for borders, need us, humans, to get them from place to diasporic place. So when you see what looks like a lone survivor of a lilac bushes in a field by itself—filled with dreamy flowers that survived, perhaps, colonizers and capitalists—remember that someone once nurtured and cared for it—and probably loved it. And the lilac bush, in turn, not only holds the memory of that human life but patiently awaits its return too, with a sweetness that can’t be contained.
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”
—Pablo Neruda
(photos of lilacs on the stolen lands of Madison, WI, and Montreal, QC, May 2025)
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