Thich Nhat Hanh and the yellow roses

One dozen long-stemmed deep yellow roses to be exact; Valentine’s day roses. Not having a large enough vase to accommodate all 12 together, I put 6 in a vase in the living room and 6 on a Chinese step cabinet which I use as a bedside table.

The 6 in the living room lasted a good 5-6 days, not bad for supermarket-bought flowers. The 6 in my bedroom were eerily fresh and unwilted at the end of the second week. Next to the bedside flowers was a photo of Thich Nhat Hanh.

If you don’t know what he looks like, he has the kind of face that is occasionally, and only, seen on long-time Buddhist practitioners. It is unwrinkled. There are no frown lines, no deep vertical clefts on either side of the mouth. He wears a perpetually serene and unsurprised expression. I keep this photo by my bedside because I like to see it when I wake up, before I get out of bed and take on the day.

I once spent a week in the presence of Thich Nhat Hanh at a retreat held at his Deer Park Monastery. He gave daily three hour dharma talks and I was close enough to watch him and become familiar with the way he moved and talked. He seemed to choose his words and his movements carefully. In other words, they didn’t choose him.

There’s more.

The flowers were not for me. I had bought them for someone very dear to me, to provide a visual manifestation of how much he was loved. He wasn’t inclined to believe that he was loved because he was in a deep depression; so deep that as the days wore on he spent much of his time lying on my bed sleeping or looking out into space – at the flowers.

At the end of the first week I commented on the roses staying so fresh.

“It’s the photo,” he said.

At the end of the second week this person so dear to me left to get more help, medical and otherwise, than I could give him.

The day after I put him on a plane, the remaining yellow roses started wilting. They were gone in a day or two.

If I have to dabble in some kind of duality, it would be to divide the world into people who matter-of-factly accept that the flowers lasted just long enough to provide some kind of a visual reminder of hope and love in what was, for at least one person, a very cold, bleak world.

Others might point to a differential in the light, air temperature or the shape of the two vases as explanation.

This is my litmus test. Not Democrat/Republican; not Christian/Buddhist; not carnivore/vegan.

My litmus test is those who believe, or don’t believe, that true compassion is not constrained by time, or by distance, or the five senses. My litmus test is those who choose to see that the practice of peace and Bodhichita heart is manifest all around us on a moment by moment basis, and those who require empirical proof that it even exists.