What Tulips Know About Desire

Hi Friends,

Last weekend I finished a five-month training in end-of-life care. That same weekend, the tulips came alive, pushing up through the dead leaves in my yard. And by Monday I was leaving them on my way to Australia. I stopped for a second, suitcase in hand, bent down, and put my face close to one. After months of sitting with death, the sight of so much insistent aliveness felt like ephemeral magic. By the time I’m back in Toronto, the tulips will be gone.

Spring is an incredible teacher on how to reach fearlessly for life in the midst of impermanence. Every bud that opens does so from a branch that, until recently, was frozen. And every flower that opens will fall in just a few weeks. And that knowing makes everything hungrier, wild with the urge to merge.

That fearlessness is a mode of contemplative practice, too. We can lean into our own yearning for life and connection to see what it has to teach us about being.

Of course it hurts when the buds burst,
hurts for that which grows
and that which ceases.
- Karin Boye

Usually, we hold ourselves slightly apart from experience, watching it from a respectful distance, imagining that we are not thronging blobs of change and desire like everything else.

Contemplative practice can reinforce this: we are meditators on the cushion, observing life at calm remove. It's a useful frame of practice, especially at the beginning. It gives us perspective and interrupts the loops of suffering we might otherwise never see.

But spring is terrible at this kind of meditation. It refuses distance. It reaches, climbs, mates, blooms! And in that rapturous insistence, it obliterates separation. The boundary between the crocus that reaches, the sun being reached for, and the act of reaching shows itself to be an illusion. They are one continuous gesture of aliveness.

When we practice with desire, letting it move in awareness and burn through our heavy narratives, it points us toward this same kind of intrinsic belonging. We too are part of a vivid continuum, already connected to everything we long for.

This month, in celebration of the wisdom and wild desire in every blooming, squawking thing, we’re practicing together on the Flower Moon.

See you there!

❤️ Lama Tasha

DATE: Friday, May 1, 2026
TIME: 8–9pm ET
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link emailed on registration)

TOPIC: Desire as Belonging
This month’s sit falls on the Flower Moon, named for the wild, unapologetic blooming that takes over the northern hemisphere in May. We’ll practice with desire as a natural movement of awareness and discover that the one who reaches, the thing reached for, and the reaching itself were never really separate.

DANA: This session is open to all on a PWYC basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or become a paid subscriber on Substack.

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