Flower Petals

 The gardener found the first brown petal floating on the pond’s surface like a tiny, desolate boat. He felt the familiar pang, the urge to net it out, to tidy the perfect green circle of lily pads. For weeks, the white bloom had been the pond’s jewel, pristine and immobile against the murky water. Its fading felt like a stain on beauty itself. But the sun was high, and the work called him elsewhere. The petal sank unseen.

Days later, the once-glorious flower was a slumped, skeletal husk, curled in upon its heart. It was an eyesore, a monument to loss. Yet, as he knelt to finally remove it, he stopped. There, nestled in the water where the decaying blossom lay, he saw a clutch of tiny, emerald-green pads, no larger than coins, radiating from a submerged node. They were vibrant, urgent, drinking in light the older, larger pads now shaded. They existed because the dying flower had not only released its hold, but had also, in its very dissolution, leached nutrients directly into the water, feeding these new beginnings at its base.

He sat back on his heels. The old lily was not just decaying; it was becoming. It was transforming from a solitary object of beauty into the living sustenance for the next cycle. To pluck it out now would be to rob the future, to sterilize the process. The pond wasn’t a portrait; it was a story.

He left the husk where it was. Within days, it had vanished completely, absorbed, and the new pads were already reaching for the sky, their stems stretching toward the very spot where the old bloom had once basked. The space had been made, and life, wiser than his grief, had rushed in to fill it.

Now, he sees not loss in a fading flower, but the quiet, necessary work of making room. The most beautiful thing a lotus can do, he learned, is not just to bloom, but to return to the mud, so that everything else might rise.