蜜芽传媒

Writer and Musician, Jahnavi Harrison:

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On my daily walk around our local area I've been known to swoon, and no, not for the sake of any human! Oh no... It's the cherry blossom I'm in a love affair with.

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I don't remember how far back it started. I remember making flower balls of the pom-poms of blossom when I was a child, throwing them back and forth til all the petals fell off. I painted and photographed them in my Art A Level. At university I wrote poems about them, odes about petals gathered like snow drifts at the curbside.

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There's a particular tree on a street near my house that's quite ridiculously romantic. The puffs of double and triple tiered blossom are pale pink, and arranged in hanging clusters that droop down so when you duck under it and look up, you just see this canopy of flowers that always makes my mum say, 'I always imagined you getting married under a tree like this! You should get married under this tree...' (Sigh).听 In our reverie we of course ignore the fact that it's located on a five foot wide pavement on a suburban street in Hertfordshire. Yes mum, I will get married under that tree... some day.

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I just love the way blossom appears, a will they-won't they swelling of buds, until all of sudden there's a pop and these visions in pink and white just arrive overnight. It's harder to be sad, frustrated or anxious when I'm looking at a tree full of blossom. It's hard not to smile when I'm doing a grocery run and a flurry of petals blow across the road like something out of a Shakespearean sonnet.

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Paying attention to nature brings me in to the present moment and brings gratitude for the simple gifts that arrive year after year, no matter what else may be going on. I smile, remembering the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, 'Of seasons, I am the flower bearing spring'. I remember that there's divinity in everything, the beautiful, and the bewildering.

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So, though the blossoms are fleeting, I'm grateful for them today. And they'll be here next year... if anyone wants to come to a wedding...it's the best cherry tree off the A41, Radlett, Hertfordshire.