consider the lilies

When I woke in the night, there was moonlight filtered through wispy clouds. My first thought was the lilies I’d found blooming under a Douglas fir we call the lyrical fir because of the way its branches spread like lines of poetry.

Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found
the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,
frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air
held or moved them as it stood or moved.

I imagined the lilies holding the moon’s light like crucibles. I didn’t go out. I returned to bed and thought about the things I’ve stopped noticing. These lilies are not wild, though you aren’t wrong if you’re thinking they’re our native Erythronium oregonum, or fawn lily. They’re a cultivar, though I’ve forgotten which one. I’ve never found the wild fawn lilies on our land but they do grow nearby, at Francis Point and Smuggler’s Cove. The pink form, E. revolutum, grows in abundance at the Oyster River estuary near Campbell River on Vancouver Island and every time we’ve been in the area this time of year we’ve stopped to walk the estuary trail to take photographs. There are masses of them, and lots of trilliums too.

I saw these pink lilies as we drove to Campbell River to begin a week’s adventure exploring the Discovery Islands. It was mid-April, 2024. On our last day, we stopped at a little island that was covered with chocolate lilies (Fritillaria affinis), death camas (Zigadenus venenosus), and nodding onions (Allium cernuum), all of them in bloom and bees hovering over them as we stepped carefully through the grass.

I didn’t know it, not yet, but that was the last week of what I think of now as Before. I am living in After, though maybe there’s hope again with the return of the lilies under our lyrical fir.

Consider the lilies. They are such quiet beauties. In the night, I should have gone out to look at them in moonlight. I have been so unhappy for the past year, sleepless too many nights, with the shadows of my mistakes hovering in my consciousness, and now I want to simply consider the lilies.

Note: the lines of poetry are Wendell Berry’s, from his poem “The Lilies”