On the dry hillsides of northern Israel grows a flower that, like me, has almost nothing to offer the world. They call it the black iris. It is dark as the worn velvet of an ancient robe, a purple so deep that light gives up passing through it and only touches it from without. I sit near it on the mornings of late winter and talk to myself, because it is perhaps the only creature that understands what I am.

The iris holds no nectar. It offers no sweetness, no perfume to intoxicate, none of the promise of abundance that other flowers use to call to those who pass. Whoever approaches it hungry departs hungry. It has learned, across thousands of seasons, that it has nothing to give but its own dark body, and that this dark body knows how to do one thing only, to keep warmth. When the sun sinks behind the hills, and the cold comes down from the mountains like an invisible water, a small bee without a hive, without sisters, searches for somewhere to spend the night. In the throat of the iris it finds a warm shelter, because the petals drank the whole day’s sun and give it back slowly to the sleeping creature, while the stars turn high above over the silence........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)