The Meaning Crisis

I wonder sometimes if the meaning crisis isn’t a grand, roaring thing, but the quiet ache of a single daffodil wilting in a vase you can’t quite hold steady.

For weeks, the tremor in my hands has been a companion. After Arthur left, the world felt like a room with too many empty chairs. Even arranging the daffodils I planted last spring—those stubborn yellow ones that push through snow—became a battle. My fingers would shake as I tried to trim the stems, water spilling onto the table, the blooms drooping like tired children. I’d set it aside, defeated, the frustration a familiar weight.

This morning, though, I sat at the kitchen table at dawn, the light just beginning to soften the grey. I took a deep breath, let the tremor be part of the moment, not its enemy. I held the stems with both hands, my knuckles white, and slowly, carefully, I trimmed. The water spilled a little. The arrangement wasn’t perfect—two stems leaned too far. But I placed it where the morning sun would catch it, and I simply saw it.

There’s a kind of grace in that. Not in the perfection, but in the stubborn act of trying to make beauty, even when your hands betray you. It proved something small, yet vast: meaning isn’t found only in grand gestures or the absence of pain. It’s here, in the quiet courage of arranging a single flower, in choosing to see the yellow against the grey. It’s proof that the crisis isn’t a void to fill, but a space where we can still choose to tend to the light, however imperfectly.

I wonder if this is what the sacred feels like—less a shout, more a breath held in the trembling hand, a daffodil held steady against the wind.

— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering