Give a Rose, and Its Fragrance Lingers on Your Hand

There is an old saying we hear from childhood. Give a rose to another, and its fragrance lingers on your own hand.

As a child I didn't understand it, and took it only as words urging us to be kind. It was later in life that I slowly saw the deep truth hidden in it.

You give away a single rose. The flower passes into another's hands, and the fragrance stays on your own.

It isn't that you give it away and it's gone. In the very moment of giving, you have already received. Giving and receiving, it turns out, are not two things but one, in the same instant. You think you are giving, but you are also being nourished.

And the wonder is in that fragrance. It is not something you sought. When you give the flower, you don't think, let me keep a little scent on my hand. You simply give the flower away. And the fragrance, naturally, stays.

This makes me think of water.

Water does not know that it nourishes all things. It has never thought of being anyone's gift. It simply, naturally, flows. And it is exactly this water, wanting nothing, only being itself, that nourishes every inch of earth it passes over.

The best state a person can be in is perhaps the same. Not to give, or do, or become someone's gift on purpose. But to be oneself, naturally, and let the kindness in one's heart flow out. To not even know one is giving. To simply be oneself, and live. And that lingering fragrance, that nourishment, will find its own way back.

The less you seek it, the more naturally it stays on your hand.

In truth, the people who move us most are often like this.

They do not clamor, do not force it, have never set out to impress anyone. They simply, quietly, do the thing they love and believe in. And it is precisely this absence of effort that gives them something deep, and powerful, that naturally draws people in, and nourishes them.

Like the artist we work with, Gordon Gu.

Their work are just this way. They do not call out, do not perform. They simply settles their heart, and carves out beauty and meaning, one piece at a time. Like that water, only flowing. Like that rose, only blooming. He never set out to be anyone's gift, and yet their have truly come, like a gift, into our lives, and the lives of many others, bringing a little more beauty, and a lingering fragrance, into our homes and our days.

This, I think, is what we want to do. Like water, like the rose, like them, to quietly do well what is ours to do, and to carry beauty, little by little, into more people's lives. Without effort, without display, without even thinking of ourselves as giving. And that fragrance will find its own way to linger, in the heart of everyone willing to feel it.

Marie, Founder of Lyfairs

🌹 Meet the artist who, simply by being himself, became a gift in many lives:
The Gordon Gu Collection →