This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Nov. 9, 1940.
There is something gay and challenging about the second blooming of flowers. Each day of their lives, as the evenings grow colder, they seem more gallant and precious.
From where I sit writing this, I see single dahlias, American Beauty red, holding their starry blooms against the purple-brown background of a plowed field. The hollyhocks beside the house are deeper in colour and healthier in growth than they were in their first blooming, and not a sign of rust mars their broad leaves. Stalks of blue delphiniums, red and lemon snapdragons, brighten the borders, and a few flecks of blue aubrietia begin to show on the rocks.
We expect flowers in their season and rejoice over them, but when they die and rise again out of the shrivel of decay, they are doubly welcome.
I never get accustomed, or cease to marvel at the second blooming of flowers here, and the poignant beauty of the autumn woods, because I find in them a sense of kinship. I am feeling this particularly today, for I had a birthday last Sunday and there is no denying the fact that the years are adding up against me.
Of course, we say, all of us who discern the signs in the evening sky, that we feel as well as we ever did, and even if that is not the exact truth, no doubt it will be entered on the right side of life’s ledger.
One of the fruits of life’s second blooming is a better understanding of people. If life has not taught us that, we have been cheated, for it is certainly one of the compensations of advancing years.
I met an old lady recently who sat alone in her daughter’s house, having declined to go with the family for a day in the country.
“They coaxed me to go,” she said quite proudly, “every one of them coaxed me, but I am better here by the radio.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, hushing her voice, though there was no one in the house but ourselves. “Their gabble tires me, their superlatives, their half-baked opinions, and my talk bores them. No, they do not show it. Neither do I — we are all very polite, but I know.
“I remember how bored I used to be with an old aunt of mine who had been all over the world and insisted on telling about it; and her teeth clicked! I didn’t want to hear about the number of dresses Queen Victoria gave to the women who dressed her hair … It’s a tragedy when old people forget their own headstrong, egotistical youth. Then they get to be positive pests, with their hurt feelings.”
I looked at her in admiration — her years had not been spent in vain. Her mind was having a second blooming.
When I read just now an account of a meeting where a speaker from Australia criticized “the women of Canada for their plunge into war work to salve their conscience, doing work voluntarily which the government should pay for,” I could see what she lacked.
She is reported further to have said that women who will not work to make democracy a success, “evidently desire nothing better than a system Hitler offers.” This is a bit of foolish talk. It makes me shudder to hear people liken even the worst aspects of democracy to anything in the dictators’ plan. There is no ground for comparison.
Democracy is not a static thing — it is a way of life, a way which can be made better day by day. It is what democracy may become and will become if we are faithful to our highest convictions which makes it worth everything we have — even life itself. Democracy must have in it the Christian compulsion toward a better way of life for the individual, the quickening of the human conscience, yours and mine, a new spirit of sacrifice, humility and honesty; a new understanding of the man who built his house of the rock.
The war is like a searchlight on our lives. It shows up the shabby places. We see now how we can dig up money when we know we must and how indifferent we were to human suffering, in peacetime. We all have a bad conscience and if, as the Australian woman says, Canadian women have plunged into war work to salve their consciences, not one of us are in position to reproach the other.
I cannot think of anything more barren and disheartening than public meetings that bring no conviction to the audience, and I have been at many.
I attended a meeting not long ago, addressed by a sincere and able woman. She told of conditions of poverty in a certain part of our country, and every person in the audience was deeply stirred by her words.
But instead of going on to show ways in which we could render help in this time of need, she proceeded at once to a criticism of governmental bodies, for the lavish way they spend money in printing pamphlets, which she said nobody reads (which is not quite the case). Immediately, the focus of the meeting changed. She had fixed the blame. She did not say that less printing of pamphlets would relieve rural conditions, but our minds jumped that gap quite easily.
That has been the weakness of many of our societies. They are blame-fixing activities. This accounts for the sterility of our temperance organizations and peace societies. We used up our strength in hating the liquor traffic and the munitions makers.
Now before any one arises and demands my head, I wish to say that I am not advocating that we should look upon evil with any soft complacency, or under the cloak of broad-mindedness become appeasers of evil. But I do say that it is only when we cast out the core of bitterness from our own heart, and overcome the pride and prejudices that we have mistaken for principles, that we will really be efficient in this great work of building a new world.
Dorothy Thompson started many discussions when, a few months ago, she wrote an editorial in a women’s magazine urging women to put their best efforts on the problems that lie all around them, in their own homes and communities, rather than struggling vainly to solve the larger problems of the world.
There is ripe wisdom in this advice, and it is not reversal of the emancipation of women, either. The larger problems of the state are merely the sum of our smaller problems. Every home, every office, every business establishment is a little world, and in it there is plenty of scope for heroism in the routine of daily life. The struggle is the same — the old fight between the voice of self and the voice of God.
I must confess I did not always believe this. Yesterday’s mail brought me a letter from a friend in Winnipeg who enclosed a magazine of 1914, which contained an article written by her and one written by me. We certainly dealt in fine big mouth-filling phrases, which covered the globe. We were sure that we knew all the answers.
I have no doubt that we would have resented it very keenly if someone had advised us not to wear ourselves out trying to save the whole wide world, and get by on some of the problems within a 12-mile limit.