The Cutting and Collecting of Magic Things

As how sometimes in dreaming hours a dog will still want to run, in mind finding further wide fields or sandy beaches, in body moving their legs swift and horizontally outward, scraping the air at some magic earth only they can see…

So I, too, live and dream in joyful motion.

Stirring in darkness certain nights, I’ll find my hand opening and closing on mythic clippers. The cutting motion so real to waking mind that I feel stem resistance, and can still see ghosts of dreamfed blooms, shimmering wild.

Snip snip! Cut clip. This life is dreaming.

~~~

My mother and my grandmothers and my stepmother and my aunties on all sides always loved an artful flora in a vase. Big displays, bitty bouquets. One bloom, all the blooms. No occasion/no budget/no problem. Bring the outside in! A beautiful life, these women showed me.

Picture this. I am at an awkward age, but still a prideful preteen with hair down past my waist and flashing eyes. My fashion sense is generally best described as MORE. Of everything please. Pick a theme and run. The world’s a stage.

But this time around, I am going more conservative in my tailoring, wearing an oversize white sweatshirt and white pants. Pristine. But not for long. I have my hair pulled back with curled front bits. I’m ready to work.

I’ve talked my friend Leah into helping host a neighborhood lemonade stand. The catch? No lemonade here. Instead, buy a bouquet, and get some OJ for free! Killer deal maaaaan.

We set up at the end of my father’s walkway to the mailbox. I bring my bike and lean it behind us in the ivy. The bike is in our way but also an obvious vibe, with flowers on the seat and cool girl tassels.

I have no memory if there were sales, aside from to my father. But has this ever really been the point? Not when you love something this much.

Later, I am 18 and home from college. I apply to work long solo shifts in an expensive floral department of a boutique grocery in the Wessssst Hilllllllllssssss. The blooming inventory is vast, varied, visually delicious.

My interview, overseen by an effortlessly cool, career designer named Sage, opens with Do you have previous floral department experience? No. Ok. Put together an arrangement for me. Pick out anything. Here’s a vase. I’ll watch until you finish and then we’ll see.

She’s silent as I do it. We are aware of time and space. The sound of clippers tick the time. I know color. I know textures that I like. I don’t yet know all the mechanics, the real how tos.

Like… how to know just the right amount of stems you’ll need to be wealthy but not wasteful. How to know that floral is architecture and you first have to build a frame. How to gather thrillers, fillers, spillers. How to handle precious, easy bruising things with deft confidence and care. How to treat your stems before you place them, and know which stems you’ll have to smash, cut criss cross, or burn. How to remove foliage not needed swiftly, quick cut or downward pull of tightened palm.

How to know the order of textures that you’ll build with. How to eyeball then snip the perfect length and place a thing just once. How to know embellishment VS editing, or when to rare scrap and pull apart and try again.

How to weave it all together and have no treasure buried hidden. How to know if a branch you’ve never met before will die early, live long, or wither pretty by quickly pinching at its leaf. How to reverse a far-gone wilting bunch, how to open unbloomed petals, how to charm a branch to bending, how to turn grasses into ribbon, and mosses into fabric.

How to think of where an eye will look and command a look again. How to answer a design demand but always keep a style. How to read a mind. How to push through when shocked with setback, or in predetermined challenge. How to find surprise each time upon completion, a satisfying pride.

I’d learn that later.

With Sage I followed instinct. I found the stem among that sea of blooms that sang to me the most, and then I built a story all around it.

I got the job.

~~~

Now it’s 21 years flown by, and life is ever full with flora.

Living things, cut things, dried things, foraged things, grown things, wild things. Paintings of flowers, dishware of flowers, dresses of flowers. A car full of flowers, and buckets and vases, collections of spiders from branches brought in. A home, a workspace studio, and storages full of large things to small things so whole events of any kind could quick bloom forth. The natural world, collected vast with wild abandon. Marie Condo would be horrified.

Sometimes the scale is small, and immediate. The arrangement is a gift. With ingredients gathered just before, or then and there together with the recipient. Let’s go right now! Maybe you’ve known this person for years. Or you’re meeting them just now. They probably never would have ever asked, but you knew they needed something beautiful.

You always keep your clippers in your purse.

Maybe it’s your backyard. Or theirs. Or you’re traveling, sometimes abroad. It’s verdant. Or dusty dry. A Frozen Winter. The hottest Summer. Wild country. City.

Sometimes you gather in a parking lot.

You find forgotten varied shrubs and textured branches on the sidelines. Patches of dried scrub poking up through pavement. One weed that turned to tall and fat soft bleached grasses. Another weed has made a vine, curling up a chain link fence that, once you lightly cut and pull it, falls off long in waves with ease, happy to be taken elsewhere. It’s a treasure hunt! -- you tell your ride along -- look everywhere, every time! Every time you’ll find the good things.

You walk together with this person. You ask them questions as you discover forage, and the topic ever varies. Let’s have some therapy. Let’s have a laugh. Let’s hear some stories! Or let’s just be, in silence, and listen to the soundtrack of what’s happening all around us; a rushing shore, a perfect tune, a din of party, or nighttime traffic and siren somewhere.

Everyone needs beauty. It is smell, and touch, and sight. It is ephemeral and breathing. It’s an arrangement of small miracles, uniquely gathered.

This life is dreaming. But it is also doing, and working in large scale.

You spend months honing a theme, dreaming, negotiating, and gathering materials. You grow whole crops for it. You order things from far away from people you’ve never met that you’ll pick up later. You rent a touring van that has only prior known musicians, and fill it with textures and vases and tools. And then finally you drive. Meandering days and nights along coast highways across state lines, pulling over to gather driftwood, sundried kelp pods, and pineconed branches where you’re able and allowed.

You’ve hired a friend to be your co-pilot and she knows how to make miles fly, with perfect music and past life ponderings and can do spirit. She watches for traffic as you bring out your 10’ extended pruners to cut young pampas grass over a guardrail.

Along the way you meet with farmers on their land and harvest alongside them. Your airbnb host at one place lets you cut whole trees worth of long lasting bay leaf and eucalyptus -- Get it all out of here please!! she says. This is fire country. True, and also free texture in abundance. Botanic jackpot. Once you think you’ve got enough, you press yet more inside the van. You’ll be picking up another van tomorrow anyhow.

Where before the gathering was slow burn, once you hit San Francisco it’s floral fire. In 4 hours you spend a cool $10k at the flower markets on Brannan. You start with favorite discount vendors buying old things that no one wanted. You know what’s good and buy in bulk. Then, you move to your favorite vendor, the family business, with the best local magic at fair prices. You end with high end, the fancy things, and following purchases are given a gift, by the owner, of something heart stopping and dried you’ve never seen before, that to this day sits atop your fridge next to heirloom vases and makes you happy.

You fly 4 further staff out to meet you when you finally arrive in Monterrey, and pop champagne. You turn the backyard to a factory. You work most of 120 hours, sleeping little and rising early. You select and cut and delegate, and watch your people floral dance among the fray. You transform two ballrooms in two days with two themes from above and from below at Pebble Beach. Security helps you hang your botanical chandeliers. You circumvent archaic teardown rules and sneak leftover bounties of autumn fruit to staff in grocery bags. . You walk the finished install with the client before group arrival, and then again with the client’s client. You laugh like old friends. You choose the largest and the best of all the airplants for her to tuck away right now. You discuss visions for her 50th birthday in Morocco. You tell her about the trick of recutting near dead hydrangea, putting it in scalding hot water, and then watching time turn in reverse.

You take your crew to fancy dinner. You wake up, all do a day and evening in Carmel beach. Then next day pack it up, fly them out, and drive home solo.

A luxury of luxuries, this scale of floral dreaming. A handsome pay can fritter away quickly when investing. Yes, sure! You could have spent less, done less, hired for less, earned more. But it was never about that, really. You’re doing what makes you happy. 10,000 hours and then some. It’s The Love of Your Life.

~~~

For all the gathering and collecting, the simple life calls sweetest. Where the only tool really needed is a pair of clippers.

You pack only your clothing and your clippers and board an airplane for the tropics. For one week you’ll stay at a fancy, beautiful place, where you’ll style a wedding.

You have permission to pick anything, anywhere. You’ve made fast friends with all the landscapers and gardeners and they will bring you things they think you’ll like or beckon to you, follow me! Language is shared in deep love of flowers.

You work late night when all is quiet, save rush of nearby ocean. You work in early morning, at long wooden tables by a pool. Ginger, bougainvillea, canna lily, lobster claw. You stumble on a hornet’s nest as you forage into shrubbery, but the gathered giant seedpods from a bloom you’d never met take out the sting. Your heart and soul are smiling. You are lucky, lucky, luckiest.

You take deep breaths. Gratitude.

~~~

When you truly love something, you find bridges between worlds of waking and of dreaming.

In design, I am a dog with open range. I run through day and night alike. With each arrangement I am young again, alert anew. I gather tools to keep within me as I carry my clippers in my hand.

Is it dreaming? Is it living? It is both, ever intertwined.

Like how a winding sweet pea vine finds a straight line to cling to as it spits out curling.

Like how a dandelion seed craves the air and earth the same.