Mad in Love with Lavender: Imagine Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

My gladioli towers, that once formed three walls around my garden, have bloomed to their highest crowns and few remain. The garden where I write all summer is turning toward fall. This is a poignant time. Although the garden is still all abundance and beautiful, I feel the coming loss. The grip of mortality.

Do the bees--so mad in love with the lavender--sense this too? Or do they only drink the now, now, now? Carpe diem?  Maybe bees have no imagination. They don't imagine, like I do, the looming winter when I will stand in the colorless garden among the cropped tops of perennials and mourn the summer. Maybe bees don't feel emotion. Feelings are one food of imagination.

The bees have instinct. Drink and be merry now for winter rushes toward us. Hurry, hurry, store up calories. Maybe instinct was a forerunner of imagination in humans. And I, in a haze of summer creativity, so mad in love with the book I'm writing that I feel drunk and hurried, maybe that's instinct too. The instinct of the artist is to be so possessed by her creation that the feeling-flower of her imagination is also her food.

But life is short. Winter looms. Let me relish the last gladioli towers and finish writing my book.