This little pottery inkwell no longer holds ink. Today it holds a few stems of helianthemum – flowers descended from a plant whose origins trace back to Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s home in the Lake District. A writer’s flower, standing now in a writer’s inkwell.
I found myself looking at it for longer than I intended.
The inkwell was made for a single purpose: to hold ink, to serve words, to sit quietly on a desk while letters were written and stories begun and thoughts made visible. That purpose passed long ago. And yet here it is, still useful – not as it was intended, but as it has become.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in that.
We tend to think of usefulness as something fixed, as though once a thing’s purpose is spent, its value fades with it. Nature rarely agrees. A fallen tree becomes a home for fungi and insects. A hollow stem shelters overwintering bees. A dead branch becomes a perch for a bird. Nothing is wasted – things simply move into a new chapter.
This old inkwell no longer holds ink. Instead it holds flowers, flowers that will themselves fade within days, their petals falling as their brief season passes. Yet for this moment, the pottery and the blooms stand together, each carrying a different measure of time – one counted in decades, the other in days.
This is often how attentive wondering begins. Not with something rare or spectacular, but with an ordinary object that asks us to stay a little longer. The longer we look, the more the relationships reveal themselves: a flower, an inkwell, a writer, a landscape, a thread quietly connecting one life to another.
Invitation to notice Choose one object in your home today. Before you name it, before you think about what it’s for, simply look at it for a few moments. What story has been waiting there all along?
The wild remembers. So do you.