Hello you, whoever you are. Thank you so much for taking the time to read these first few lines. I have this annoying voice in my head that often tells me that nobody is interested in what I have to say, but who cares, I want to say things into the virtual air and see if they float away and find someone who relates. Before I begin, I would like to say that English is not my first language and even if I have been speaking it since I was 5 years old, you will still be able to pickup my Spanish voice on here, perhaps a bit of my accent and definitely my poorly translated sayings. Why do I write in English? Because I want to reach as many people as I can and I know that most of my lovely followers who speak Spanish can understand English as well.
About Flowers and the passing of time.
I love flowers, they have been a part of my life ever since I can remember. I can see them and feel them in all of my memories, in all of the people I love and in my future too. I want to make flowers forever, it is what my heart needs to pump a little bit more excitedly every day.
I watched my grandmother making paper flowers ever since I can remember, but it wasn’t until I was about 13 years old that I asked her if she would teach me how to make them. I sat next to her on a wooden stool in her wonderful workshop and she taught me the family secret of flower making.
I wish I had asked her how she had learned, I wish I had kept every single flower she put at the top of each present she gave me. But I was young and unaware of how much I would miss her one day and took it all for granted..
I did learn how to make a rose on that day though, and what she gave me then was the most special legacy I was ever to receive.
I filed that knowledge somewhere in my brain and went on with my life full of blind confidence and the certainty that I was meant for greatness, and then life happened.
It wasn’t until I was 33, at home with a new born baby that my brain and body started begging me to let my creativity out. It’s not like I wasn’t creative, I had been doing a creative job and followed a creative career path, but I needed to make! That’s when that little rose came back to me. I gathered as many materials as I could find and like Forest Gump when he got off the porch bench and started running, I couldn’t stop. I had re connected with my own true essence.
So you see, I’m going to be making flowers for the rest of my life just because that is who I am.
I am a few months off turning 40 now, and to be honest It doesn’t really bother me. You can’t stop time, and life is good at all stages. Having said that, I can’t help but feeling like I have very little time left to ‘make it’ before I become ‘invisible’. I know that society is obsessed with youth and beauty, freshness, newness. But what about those of us who were busy in our twenties dealing with the shit that real life brought with it? I have a feeling that that might be most of us?
My mother got ill with terminal Cancer when I was 25 years old, one month after I had finished my Master’s degree. She chose not to have treatment, she died 3 weeks before I turned 26.
Have you ever been caught by a wave whilst swimming in the sea? You are dragged and rolled around underwater with no sense of direction or certain knowledge of if you’ll ever come out for breath again? That’s what grief was like for me. Grief is like antidote to the rosie tinted glasses of naïveté most people are unaware of wearing in life, there is so much to deal with and it goes on and on and on.
I am not blaming my life on that moment though, I have had an easy life compared to many, and I have made all my own choices and decisions. I just got thrown off the path and it took me a while longer to find my way back to it.
My point is that life is not straight forward and that most of us don’t find our true passions until it is ‘too late’. But too late is nonsense! There shouldn’t be an expiry date on our common consciousness let alone inside our heads. We need to start celebrating wonderful people not just new wonders.
I am so grateful for flowers because they a certainty in my life.
Now tell me, do you relate or am I having a mid life crisis?
Ita Lillywhite 
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