White blossoms carpet a mountain path no one looks at twice

A single white blossom drifts down and settles on a shoulder — only then a look up: the whole tung tree is in white bloom, and as the wind passes the flowers fall, petal by petal, carpeting the mountain path, settling on the water, like a snow that will not melt. The air holds a faint green of grass and the smell of wet earth, with a thread of some unnamed wildflower's sweetness. In the Hakka hill country of Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli, just for these few days of May, there is a sight like this.

The tung blossom is no precious flower. On the ordinary hills behind the Hakka villages it has grown for over a hundred years — in earlier days the Hakka planted tung for its oil and seeds, a cash crop to keep a family fed, never for ornament. Once the season passes no one mentions it again, and a fallen carpet of it is merely swept away. Yet when these trees "planted for a living" all bloom at once, the whole forest changes colour — and that beauty grows, quietly, out of the most practical of things.

Up the trail, a path perhaps walked many times, unremarkable on ordinary days; but once the blossom comes, even the stone steps underfoot are layered white, and suddenly it is worth slowing the step. The wind comes in gusts, the flowers fall in gusts, falling ahead, falling behind, falling into the stream to be quietly carried off. There is no place one must reach, only the fallen flowers to follow upward, until how far one meant to go is forgotten.

An old woman comes slowly along with a carrying-pole, the pole rising and dipping with a creak, a few white petals on her shoes; she does not give the flowers a glance — to her this is simply May, the same every year, nothing worth stopping for. And yet someone stopped a long while for the very same thing. In that moment it becomes clear: the most beautiful scene is often what the locals take for granted, and what you happen upon for the first time.

Crouching to look at the fallen flowers on the ground, not gathering them, not taking many photos. The flowers still fall, petal by petal, onto hair, onto the back of a hand, cool, pausing a moment, then carried off by the wind. A petal pinched up between the fingers is almost weightless, a touch of pale yellow at its heart against the snow-white, clean as if just washed.

That day, staying on the mountain until dusk, the flowers all over the clothes and the hair, no brushing them clean. I think you too will slowly understand: this beauty was not arranged by anyone for you to see; it was always here, blooming every year, falling every year — only these few days, you happened upon it. And to happen upon it at all is, in itself, a kind of luck.