The Scent of Hope by Jade Wyatt/Elizabeth Snow

My husband bought me lilies for Valentine’s Day. They are enormous; white blooms unashamedly ostentatious; their heady, exotic scent rising like a sacred offering, dispelling the odours of attempted toddler toilet training, cat litter, and musty fingerprints of God-knows-what on unwashed walls.

Five children bring love, laughter, chaos, and wonder to my world, but they also push romance into the abyss beneath the couch cushions, along with creativity, silence, and reflection. We’re just too busy.

Flowers are a rebellion.

We can’t afford them. We don’t need them. They bring no practical value to our household. And yet their scent… Why does their scent fill me with hope?

Flowers take me outside. Beyond the walls of school drop-offs, dinner preparation, appointments, and fear, fear, everywhere; beyond my own skin, pain, age, and memories that flicker like fading candlelight. They take my hand and lead me to a place where green grows deep and bright, where blooms reach and hang in clustered colour, where the air carries water from sea and river, and the earth remembers.

Flowers are words.

Both hold the wildness of chaos and harmony, symmetry and serendipity. Both sing of a rich and mysterious beauty that we long for, yet never fully reach. Both are formed from love – a love which we cannot comprehend, yet know we need if we are to be truly alive.

Even as a child, words were always more to me than symbols through which we communicate. Words – both read and written – held a kind of magic, a hint of something intangible and vital. I wrote, not for my words to be read, but simply to stay connected to that mystery.

Then I grew up. I left school, got a job, found a partner. Life was good. Words and their magic became the silly, remembered fantasies of childhood. I got married, had a child, then another, and another. For ten years of my life, I built a world for my family out of myself, stretching skin wide and thin around a frame of brittle bones, hollowing myself out to become a place where they could be safe from the monsters outside.

But the monster was me. Like a wild, trapped thing, I savaged my way out from the cage I had created. The world I had carefully built collapsed, and I was lost, buried in the wreckage.

And there, in the silence left behind, I heard a sound I’d long forgotten.

Words. Humming like vibrations through the air, through my fingers. Hidden in the undergrowth, in the infinite. I listened.

I enrolled to study Creative Writing at Tabor Adelaide. I crawled into my first class, waiting for someone to expose me as the fraud I felt I was. But the pointed finger never came and, instead, I found a doorway to a world of rich and vivid colour – a world I remembered. I had been to this place before. I knew these wild paths, these sensations of movement and texture and rhythm, and this feeling of limitless possibility.

I breathed deep the sweet air of freedom and stepped through the open door. I began to write again. The dam wall had burst, and I wrote like a mad thing, poems pouring out from me with a roar. Soon I had gathered enough for my first anthology, Then There Was You – but I needed a new name for this awakened self. To be honest, I sought to be slightly sheltered from the raw intensity that somewhat frightened me. And so I became Elizabeth Snow. Not child, nor mother, nor wife. Elizabeth Snow – the woman who writes.

I have had two more children since I began to write again, but I will never again believe that I must sacrifice my own inner world in order to nourish theirs. Here is where I come alive, where words hold truth and power, and where my children may see what hope looks like.

Hope is where flowers bloom. It is where I grow, verdant and rebellious. Hope is an act of great courage – to choose to remain close to the source, close to love, even when the world tells us we are selfish or proud, or unnecessary. For me, to hope is to write. And to write is to live.

To know that which gives us life is itself a gift, and though we may choose to share it, we must never let it be lost.

Hope shows us not just a flower, but closer – the intricate design, the swirl of ivory on emerald, the undulation of petal and leaf; the scent of honey and pine; the silk of milk and green… Then, closer still, we see beauty, possibility, love. We see ourselves mirrored there, perfect, imperfect, flawed and flawless. Loved.

We are flowers.

We are words.

And we must never lose hope.

AUTHOR BIO