07/24/2026
Someone put a marigold in the Buddha’s bowl.
We spent the afternoon planting. A mug pressed into service as a pot, two old stone planters at the door, dirt everywhere. Somewhere in the middle of it a bloom ended up in the stone hands by the wall, and nobody moved it.
That flower travelled to get here. Marigolds are native to Mexico — Portuguese ships carried them east in the 1500s, and they took to India so completely that it’s hard now to picture a temple threshold without them. Offering flowers, on two sides of the world.
Four hundred years later, in a bowl by our door, doing the same work.