Summer with Daffodils

Winters in Canada are harsh. While living in Toronto, I have come to appreciate the importance of the warmth of the sun and the beauty it brings with it, the free spaces that come into sight after the snow has melted, the greens that start coming out after a few months of no snow. It is surreal. I love taking strolls and enjoy the beauty of nature.

One of my routines is to come back from the stroll and sit alongside my big window looking at my neighbor's plants. One of the plants that signify the coming of summers is pink daffodils. They are pretty to look at and simmer out of the sunshine and blossom into an announcement of summer.

My first pieces of earrings are a reminder of that. That announcement that I feel slowly whispering into my ears that summers are here. I have sat by the window and observed those beautiful daffodils for months at a stretch, as much as my schedule allowed, and every time I saw them, I made a knot of thread.

And sometimes sitting in High Park, before the madness of covid began, I sat looking at them and tying those knots one after another.

Slowly, the same way, my knots grew and blossomed and took a life of their own. They are enjoying and soaking in the sun at their own pace, forming patterns and designs, and some mistakes. Unraveling a skein of thread as they slip through my fingers, and I cut them in different lengths to make my designs feels so meditational, like I can empty my head from everything else but the count of threads and knots.

Sometimes it feels as if I am not making them. The strings are making themselves into knots. I am just letting them be, and they take shapes for me, some bigger than the others, some brighter, some more intricate, some smiling in their simplicity. Something like the daffodil flowers, they just blossom into being their true self.

I just knot these feelings into threads, the feeling of happiness, warmth, patience. All these feelings that I felt while tying every single knot. All those emotions are now coming to you, from daffodils to me and from me to you. Making you shine, making you glow, making you pink with happiness.

Soon the summers will go. It is nature and I respect and love nature. It comes and it goes, it is the circle of life. I don’t want to resist it. I want to embrace its beauty every year with different seasons. Its like me designing my pieces. I have to keep trying new patterns, new shades of threads, new knots. Reinventing my own craft, just like nature reinvents itself with each passing season. That is the connect with nature that we forget. Nature keeps reminding us every year with different colors and shades of the same seasons that she is the source of all creativity.

I like all the creativity nature shows in all seasons. But no one can stop me from holding on to the beautiful memories of one season to another. We humans can find ways to stay happy always. This is my way of tying the happiness, the memories that the sunshine and daffodils bring in each piece that I make. It is like my personal summer filled with daffodils forever which no snowstorm or minus thirty degrees can take away.

It is my small way of hanging this summer in my art and hook it right next to my ears. As if they whisper into my ears “It's summer with daffodils for us always”.