Step Inside a Flower With Me

Georgia O'Keeffe has just the one

It’s time to imaginarily slip into another painting. It’s keeping me sane which is important since I have cats to feed. My last visits were inside a Salvador Dali and a Vladimir Kush.

Today I want my world to be a flower so I know just the artist to consult.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it,
it’s your world for a moment.
~Georgia O’Keeffe

It’s a week since I returned from the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, where Georgia O’Keeffe used to hang out with other creative insomniacs and geniuses, I’ve chosen one of her most famous works as my current address: Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, painted in 1932. A masterpiece that’s roughly the size of a garage door and sold for more than most neighborhoods cost, ($44.4 million). It’s a soft place to hide out from the crumbling of our country.

I pass through the frame the way you walk through one of those portals into a fantasy novel, except instead of a wizard there’s a museum guard saying, “You again?” I give him a smile and a peace sign, and sink into O’Keeffe’s world. He rolls his eyes and moves on because a man is licking a Wayne Thiebaud painting.

The white flower rushes up to meet me, enormous, unapologetic, yet hospitable; cropped so close there is nothing else in sight, no electronic devices, no sky, no small talk, just the intimate geography of petals and a few green leaves holding the operation together.

Georgia liked to make flowers fill the canvas so that people who normally ignored them, busy city dwellers, distracted mortals like me, would finally have to stop and look, the way you can’t ignore someone who sits too close at a dinner party and begins recounting their two divorces and one ayahuasca retreat, or shows you 500 photos from their silent retreat. But a flower is filled with so much beauty.

The first thing I noticed in the painting is the silence. It’s not the quiet of absence, but the hush of deep attention. White petals the size of sails curve around me like welcoming arms, whispering, “You can rest here, even if the world is in the middle of soulless injustice.” There are soft gradations of ivory and green that keep inviting me to take it easy. [breathe].

It’s a giant white trumpet of permission to let it all go for a while and enjoy life despite those who’d find satisfaction if we lived in despair.

The air smells of desert and discipline. You can feel O’Keeffe’s presence, tall, spare, majestic in her black dress, her hands still working color into shape long after she should’ve stopped for homemade soup made with fresh veggies from her garden. She painted this flower so close-up you can’t help but surrender to its intimacy; it’s as if she wanted to remind us that beauty isn’t fragile at all, it’s enormous and unapologetic.

Beauty is enormous and unapologetic.

It takes up space like an audacious eccentric flinging her a cape around her at an art colony.

Being in here, I can feel an echo of Taos and of the house where O’Keeffe once stayed as Mabel Dodge Luhan gathered her salon of painters, writers, photographers, and complicated personalities. The Mabel Dodge Luhan House is assembled against the backdrop of the mountains, built in a Pueblo Revival style that blends Native and Spanish influences. It feels like a place that would like you to make something: art, trouble, enlightenment, or at least a well-phrased compliment about Sophia’s blueberry cobbler.

Hanging out in the painting is soothing. I hear Georgia whisper, “Remember: the point is not to understand the flower, be the flower.” So I comply. I breathe in slow spirals and the fragrance, pretending my thoughts are pollen … some of them land elegantly on wisdom, others dive headfirst into nonsense … both are fine. A petal brushes my shoulder and I think, This is twice as poetic and cheaper than therapy.

Outside, the mountains stand in that unbothered way mountains do, as if to say, “I’ll be here when you’re done with this unwanted phase of traumatic surrealism.” Inside, the floors creak, and the walls feel thick enough to hold not just warm air, but to keep out the craziness. There are all the unspoken impulses and unfinished drafts of the people who once came here seeking something they couldn’t quite name and going away with spirits refreshed and ideas supersized. I did too.

The place is a National Historic Landmark now, a “living, breathing haven for creative people,” which sounds noble until you remember that creative people also leave coffee cups in weird places and sneak banana muffins from the dining hall too close to dinner.

I’ve said it before, inhabiting a painting doesn’t make the world less broken. It does, however, offer a resilient alternative to despair: the practice of stepping into something made with care, by hands that believed beauty was worth the trouble.

Beauty is worth the trouble.

When I eventually step back out of the giant Jimson Weed and into my tiny kitchen, some of that oversized stillness comes with me, a memory in my body of what it’s like to live, even for a little while, inside a single, magnified moment of attention.

I’m already scanning places of art for my next artist-in-residence opportunity. Any requests? Maybe I’ll spend next week inside a Miró painting, where primary‑colored constellations rearrange themselves every time I exhale.

I’ll let art do what it’s been quietly doing for centuries: saving us, moving us, inspiring us to pay attention to something other than just the negative space… one glance at a time.

For the next two minutes, imagine you live inside one tiny detail of a painting you love: [got one?} Find.. the soft blur of a shadow, the light on a windowsill, floating like a goat in a Chagall. Let your attention rest there as if nothing else exists. Gently describe what you notice using all your senses, beginning each line with “ I am aware of…”. If your mind wanders to worries or to‑do lists, just smile at them, and return to this small, sacred fragment of the painting, the way you’d return to your own breath.

Petaling peace,
Jill

P.S. Next Taos retreat is Feb 6-10, 2027
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