When I was younger, I was devoted to autumn.
Its hush, its melancholy—these were companions I welcomed. The crackle of leaves beneath my boots, the rich scent of woodsmoke, the return of school with its clean-slate feeling. Bonfires and football games, warm drinks in chilled hands. Autumn felt like structure, like ritual. It gave me something to wrap myself in.
I loved its muted colors—its burnt oranges and ochres, its fading greens, its golden hour that seemed to last all day. Autumn didn’t pretend to last. It offered itself in full knowledge of its transience. It taught me that endings could be beautiful, too.
But as I’ve grown older, I’ve felt my heart drift—toward spring.
It didn’t happen all at once. Spring used to feel chaotic to me: mud, pollen, too much green too fast. But now, it feels like clarity. Like the deep breath after grief. I long for it in late winter—not just for the warmth, but for the return of color. I catch myself watching the buds on my roses like a man scanning the horizon for a ship. There is a longing in spring that feels like the longing in me.
Evenings are different now. I sit on the porch, pipe in hand, listening to the hush between birdsong. The chill lingers, but it’s losing. The light is different—longer, gentler. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens.
And maybe I’ve changed too. My tastes certainly have. Football no longer excites me the way it once did. I’ve found myself turning to baseball, a game I once considered slow, even dull. But now it feels like music written in long notes.
Former MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti once wrote:
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring… and as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
Baseball, like spring, teaches you how to wait. How to savor the in-between. How to understand the moment not as fleeting, but as sacred because it’s fleeting. I watch the games with quiet reverence now—less for the action than for the pacing, the anticipation. I realize I’ve started living the same way.
So much of my time now is spent tending roses. I am not a gardener by nature—I dislike the labor of it, the weeds and the mulch and the thorns. And yet, I do it. Because with every leaf I cut, every bloom I feed, I feel myself participating in something larger, slower, necessary. They give back more than I give. In color. In silence. In grace.
And this is why I find myself drawn again and again to Balthasar van der Ast’s Floral Still Life with Shells (1622).
At first glance, it’s easy to miss the depth. A bouquet, a vase, some shells—decorative, harmless. But the longer you look, the more you see. Here are roses and tulips, carnations and irises, all rendered with exquisite care. The shadows fall just so. A butterfly perches. A bee crawls over a blossom. The dew clings, as if it might fall.
But it won’t. It never will. That’s the point.
Van der Ast was working in an age of innovation. The early 17th century Dutch Republic was brimming with curiosity and commerce, and a new genre was blooming: the still life. These floral and shell compositions were radical. For centuries, art had been the domain of saints and myths. But now, beauty was enough. Nature was enough. The ordinary became extraordinary.
To paint a flower—a thing that lives for days—was to defy time. To pair it with a shell—once living, now hollow—was to speak a sermon in symbols.
This was more than a bouquet. It was a vanitas. A reminder: everything fades.
And yet, here we are, 400 years later, and the iris still blooms.
There is deep tension in that. The flowers in my yard will wither. I know this. I watch the petals fall, one by one. But van der Ast’s blooms do not fall. His bee never flies. His butterfly never moves. In pigment and patience, he preserved something that should not last.
This is what makes still life sacred.
Keats once wrote,
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
But even he knew that was only partly true. Real beauty passes. The joy is in remembering.
That’s why I photograph my roses. Why I sketch them. Why I bought a flower press. It’s why I’ve tried painting, even though I’m no van der Ast. These are all ways of saying: stay. Stay a little longer. Let me hold you.
And beauty, like love, never stays. That’s what makes it love.
Edna St. Vincent Millay captured it perfectly:
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.