This morning, as I was leaving a meeting held in a public community hall, I saw a discarded sign saying 'Reception' and a few tall stemmed lilies poking out of a garbage can that was set right where the building met the parking lot. The flowers were so beautiful that it seemed like a heartless act to have put them in trash. Whoever hosted the reception the night before had moved their guests and celebrations on to the new day.

The flowers had served their purpose for the ones who hosted the reception, and like the sign, had been discarded for good. While they valued the beauty of the flowers, this beauty was bought and measured implicitly with the money spent on the flowers. When valued by money, it was easier to toss them after the event, than to care for the real value - the beauty they brought into the world. Nipun's talk about the problem with valuing priceless things in money comes to mind here. Imagine if the flowers had to be grown and cared for by the ones who wanted to use them for beautifying their event. I am pretty certain that they would not be cut or tossed so easily then. 

I prefer to get a living potted plant that I can care for, instead of fresh cut flowers, just because it makes me sad when the flowers die and wilt, and have to be discarded. I am not sure who spread the custom of gifting cut flowers and turned it into a commercial industry. To see the lilies, some of them unopened buds, discarded like this, just stopped me dead in my tracks. People rescue animals from shelters, and I made an instinctive decision to rescue these unwanted flowers. I stopped and picked them out, only to discover there were many more flowers there than what was visible before. Now, I need to find someone who would like having them.​



As I picked these treasures from the trash, I felt a solidarity with the trash-pickers. In California, I have seen some poor people picking aluminum cans from public trash bins to recycle them for money. If I am close enough, I thank them for recycling. One time, one of them got on the same train as me from the station where he had just searched through all the bins, and when I thanked him, he started to tell me how the police harass him for doing it. Maybe the trash-pickers depicted in the book "Beyond the Beautiful Forever" and the movie "Slumdog millionaire" also felt like I did, that they were finding treasures in trash. May all buds bloom where they are planted, and if flowers are plucked for spreading their beauty, may they be cherished enough to be pressed into books to be discovered in some distant furutre by an unsuspcting book lover who opens the pages of an old fashioned book.