Wildflowers

Centuries ago, in a small village far away, the inhabitants followed an eerie tradition of leaving the house at the hint of dusk in the pursuit of wildflowers. Natives believed a bouquet of wildflowers adorning their home would improve their lives and make them socially reverent. As the dusk dawned, natives left their home to collect exceptionally rare flowers from the farthest corner of the world.

They walked for miles; parched, famished, and fatigued, with an unfathomable stubbornness in the heart and wounds in the feet. Some of them, in their search for wildflowers, went so far that they never came back to the village. In this sacred senselessness of events, the natives followed another tradition. They would not pick the fallen wildflowers, only pluck them. Overlooking the fallen ones, the natives, running and panting, looked for the flowers and when they found one, they did not bother to smell it. They simply put it in their basket of accomplishments and continued their quest for the next one. Slow and steady, the fortunate ones gathered enough flowers to make a bouquet and made their way back home, where they eventually started the prominent act of binding them together for public exhibition. The flowers were tied with the string of hope to garner admiration and were placed in the vase of rivalry. However, a local knew that the importance of wildflowers is not in the vase but in the act of looking at them, admiring them and moving on. And if life offered her flowers on the way, she did not put them on display as accomplishments, but gently held them, sniffed them, and placed them in her favourite books, where the prominence of wildflowers and her relationship with them kept on living forever.