flower

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it.  After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile.  He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon.  According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.

So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colorful but have no fragrance.

...and the time came when the risk it took to remain in a tightly closed bud became infinitely more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

... That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.

The dance of the flower in the wind, in the sun, in the rain, cannot be understood by the head; the heart has to be open for it.