a little flower

13 Oct 2025

3 minute read

Last summer I saw various facets of the world I had never really seen. I understand them better now.

You told me your idealism had ceded to a new kind of wisdom. When you saw a rose you learned to think of the thorns protecting it rather than how pretty it was. You said the person who loved to read and write in pursuit of beauty was naive. That this search could only exist in the fleeting respite of a harsh world, and you did not want to be there when the sentence ended. That magic is ruined by the distasteful forces that allow its temporary existence.

Our future in uncertain, and the tides are changing. But you know there is no point in yelling for help on a piece of flotsam in the open sea. If you are serious we need to build a new ship together. To forget the name of the rose, to lose that glint of magic in your eyes, is to accept a ship made of thorns.

I want to sail the world and look out to the horizon – to explore and draw this disjointed beauty into a sketch, and identify a single nugget of magic. The moment we do, will you jump with me onto some alien lands, pencil-sword in hand, and fight to keep drawing? Because it is that brave explorer’s wisdom that I seek.

Mounting such an expedition will be hard. The explorer must gather resources, build his ship and find companions. He finally sets off, and must sail on unruly currents – if he avoids them all he will achieve nothing; if he takes the wrong one he falls straight for the sirens.

But along the way he notices many new things. The children on the beach playing in the sand. The rich gathering in the coastal cities. The rejects lingering in the muddy banks. The other great ships along his path and their fierce captains. The men that build a magnificent edifice and explore new lands. Those whose ships are just the facade of a parasitic enterprise. Those that were simply evil from the beginning. And finally the men who come only in dreams, lying silent in the depths, mourning all they sought to fight for.

This sprawling nature, these formidable currents and ships, the world of men and the cities and even the youths lying in the coast, they remind him of what he knew, deep within his soul, as an inviolable truth – that he must understand and transform the world at the same time. That although it is possible he destroys more than he can save, he must have the explorer’s birthright — the freedom to interact with the imagination of nature, these sprawling currents, tides and men that he could never see on his own.

If he holds on to his quest, if he works hard and is very lucky, maybe, in the quiet hours of the night, he will catch a glint of something new. That moment will come with the violence of the tropical vines yielding to the blade, the rocks parting to make way, the truth revealing itself like a scar. There is a chance his steady soul will remember what brought him to the edge of the world to find that truth. A chance that he can hold that truth within himself. A chance that he can let it echo in the name of the rose, rather than its thorns.

“To create a little flower is the labour of ages” — William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds…” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago