Flowers
Happy spring!
Isn’t it weird how time keeps moving and environments just flip in a matter of weeks? How newborns just start creeping out of everywhere and releasing playful energies into the atmosphere?
In springtime, walking lightens into a skip. Warm, sugary spices get shoved to the back of the pantry and replaced with fresh herbs. Birds make sounds, sun stays out longer, and itchy, horny eyes fight to stay open and ogle the new color palettes.
That’s the vernal equinox for ya!
In honor of the change of seasons, this HTFHTS episode is all about the bb buddings of spring. Welcome to the Flowers episode!
To listen to the radio show, check out this very cool Mixcloud link. And here’s an updated HTFHTS playlist archive.
What to expect when you’re expecting [to listen to a flower-themed radio show]:
In one hour and two spillover minutes, you can expect to take a pleasant jaunt with Mother Nature herself. As with all HTFHTS jaunts, this one will be intermittently dance-charged.
You will be led by a mighty rank of flowers (Kalbells, KAINA, Sweet Female Attitude) both loving and proud, taking care to stop, admire, and tend to their petaled kin who have taken root in carefully arranged gardens (The Rah Band, Danae, Jess Sah Bi & Peter One) flanking the way. You will encounter tall trees (Kalbells, Strawberry Switchblade) dancing in the wind (Malcolm Cecil) and stumble upon a rushing river (Mozez) where you will pause to gaze and reflect on the cyclical returns (KAINA, ETM & mariagrep, Alabaster DePlume) that spring always brings.
Intuitively, you know this is the start of something new and different, though well within a perfect natural order that somehow always makes sense - if not to you personally, then to some arachnid ogling and admiring the well-worn patterns of your heart (Eris Drew) from across the way and through all eight eyes.
So, where do we go from here? How about 8 CE Rome? Okay, sure.
Because in Ovid’s 11,995-line narrative poem “Metamorphoses,” a whole bunch of confused and confusing men get turned into flowers, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it while curating this set.
Narcissus, for example, was a famously sexy guy who people of all genders wanted to bang, but who never loved anyone or anything until he saw his own reflection in the water. The sight made him so existentially horny, he pined until he dropped dead.
“How often he tries to kiss the image in the water,
Dips in his arms to embrace the boy he sees there,
And finds the boy himself, elusive always, always,
Not knowing what he sees, but burning for it,
The same delusion mocking his eyes and teasing.”
Ultimately, Narcissus gets turned into a daffodil (aka narcissus). It’s a punishment for his vanity but also a relief from the grips of unrequited love.
Another example is athletic babe Hyacinthus, the lover of Apollo.
What happens when a sun god and Spartan prince get together? They rub their bodies down with oil and play impassioned games of discus - up and until one of them tragically kills the other with a blow to the head.
Here, again, a flower emerges out of some type of tragic love story. The two were literally flying through the air, laughing ecstatically and playing catch, when their mutual enthusiasm for each other turns a classic Greek god/mortal fuckfest into something much darker. And sadder!
In the end, and so that he and Hyacinthus are never truly apart, Apollo uses his powers to make his lover’s bloodshed sprout flowers, inscribing in their petals a grief-stricken “Ai Ai,” Greek for “Alas.”
Alas!
I do not surmise that these are the stories and sentiments Stevie Wonder was thinking about when he wrote “Come Back As A Flower” (my favorite Stevie song ever, covered by KAINA in this Flowers playlist), but I also cannot NOT think about them whenever I hear it.
There’s something really beautiful, heavy, and true about spreading the “sweetness of love” via floral reincarnation, pollination, and a “rainbow smelling sweet” in the earthly air.
It’s just, like, what if we could, at a whim and ever-so responsibly, de-escalate bad situations or overwhelming feelings by temporarily morphing into flowers? Not altogether perishing, like Narcissus, but just chilling there, suspended in space and time as daffodils and allowing the bees and dew to give back to the land until we’re ready to return and kindly face whatever it is in the eye?
This is the imagery I’ll take with me as set out to explore a very weird world in springtime.
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