Overview: In 2020, as COVID-19 spread from Asia to North America, Zen Buddhist and ikebana practitioner Joan Stamm was forced to cancel her long-anticipated trip to Japan, where she had planned to research a flower temple pilgrimage and learn the deeper meaning of flowers known as “little Buddhas”.

But with lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, Stamm, who lives on a mountain on an island in the Salish Sea, sequestered herself like a hermit and turned to her own flower garden for solace and meaning as the pandemic engulfed the world around her.

Verdict: The Language of Flowers in the Time of COVID tells the story of Stamm’s life and spiritual journey through these difficult times. Using traditional Japanese flowers as seasonal indicators, Stamm speaks the poetic language of flowers to explore ancient flower metaphor as it relates to the pandemic and the many manifestations of impermanence in one of the most tumultuous years in American history.

For many Americans, let alone the world, of course, the scale of the coronavirus crisis calls to mind 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis—events that reshaped society in lasting ways, from how we traveled and purchased homes, to the level of security and surveillance we’re accustomed to, and even to the language we use.

A global, novel virus that kept us contained in our homes for months that ran into a couple of years, if only fear wise, was already reorienting our relationship to government, to the outside world, even to each other.

This meant that some changes the experts expected to see in the coming months thereafter, and for years to come, might/would feel unfamiliar or unsettling.

But crisis moments also present opportunity: more sophisticated and flexible use of technology, less polarization, a revived appreciation for the outdoors and life’s other simple pleasures.

One of those being writing, for when the onset of the pandemic puts a pebble in the shoe of author Joan D. Stamm, her cherished plans for a flower temple pilgrimage in Japan all blown away in the Covid wind, instead of being angry or overly disappointed, Stamm combined her knowledge of flower symbolism and Buddhist teachings to bring forth a quite unique, and wholly heartfelt new prose.

One where the Great Mystery, that unnamed, and many named, universal force that operates in its own way, in its own time, in unique and complex patterns too intricate to comprehend by the human brain, had laid out a most devious plan for 2020 that nobody, except for a few infectious disease experts, saw coming.

So with her planned journey to include spending the whole month of April 2020 in Japan exploring a flower temple pilgrimage in the Kansai region - which would have been the quite literal face-to-face of her investigation into the deeper meaning of hanakotoba: the language of flowers, now gone, her book The Language of Flowers in the Time of COVID: Finding Solace in Zen, Nature and Ikebana is one dutifully laced with some of the most beautifully-curated, colorfully-hued details and descriptions, that you yourself will close your eyes after reading each chapter and see (maybe even smell) each and every flower that is being oh-so lovingly described.

About the Author - Joan D. Stamm is the author of A Pilgrimage in Japan: the 33 Temples of Kannon, and the award winning Heaven and Earth are Flowers: Reflections on Ikebana and Buddhism. She is co-founder of Cold Mountain Hermitage, a Zen Buddhist study and practice group, and a certified teacher of the Saga School of Ikebana. www.joandstamm.com. She lives in Eastsound, Washington.

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