What flower is the most beautiful in the world? Not the peony blooming in spring in Luoyang, not the single flower a tea master displays in his tea room, not the autumn grasses covering the slopes of the Tyrolean mountains, not the fragrant lavender in the fields of Haute-Provence. 

In the late 1960s, when the "hippies" gathered in Washington to protest the US invasion of Vietnam and sat on the ground facing a line of armed soldiers, a young woman among them stretched out one hand and offered it to the expressionless soldier before her. No flower on earth could be more beautiful than the small rose beloved by the Little Prince of Saint-Ex. It was also the wild lily, described in the Bible as rivaling even Solomon's height of glory. 

On one side was unprecedented military power, and on the other was a powerless woman. On one side was the organization of the American empire and its rational calculation; on the other, the anonymous individual and the spontaneity of their emotions. Power versus the civilian population. Automatic rifle versus a small flower. Nothing so easily tramples one over the other.

But one can love a small flower, but not an empire. Power trampling on a flower destroys the very possibility of love. What will the wealth, power, law, and order thus maintained bring to the individual? They will only bring some material pleasure and much vanity, some satisfaction of the desire for power and much anxiety, emotional instability, the constant pursuit of sensory stimulation, and an unfilled void in the heart. No intellectual manipulation or rational calculation can restore the ability to love once it has been lost. 

There are times in this world when you must choose between power and the small flower. While a flower's life is certainly short, every earthly empire will eventually perish. Looking out over the course of human history from the heights of Canon, the life of the lilies of the field and the fate of Solomon's kingdom are like ephemeral bubbles, appearing and disappearing. It's said that American actor Peter Falk declined an invitation from the Japanese emperor, citing a prior engagement that evening. I imagine that this prior engagement was with a friend, a lover, or an American citizen. If my imagination is correct, he chose his little flower over the symbol of a nation's power structure. I hope that my choice will be on the side of the little flower, not the mighty one.

 I may not always be able to achieve this, but I always find the life of an anonymous flower, offered solely to testify to the human capacity to love, in the face of a power adept at arming, intimidating, deceiving, bribing, and rationalizing itself, infinitely beautiful.