She emerges from absolute nothingness. Bleak, brown, hard-edged. From this she hides her delicate face until she simply can’t stay in the substrate any longer. She has no choice. She must break free.
The edges of her tiny petals radiate a passionate violet at the tips. It is a defiant refusal to submit to her drab surroundings. She is determined to stand apart – to be seen.
And see her I do…just in time. As I round the assent near the peak of the trail, the brilliance of her fuchsia and white fingers against the trail catches my eye. I quickly step aside to protect her and stoop low to make her acquaintance.
The backdrop of each petal, her naissance, is alabaster white – like a dazzling cloud amid a bright blue sky. In contrast, and almost as if her petals had been hand-painted, veins of bright pink cut through the white culminating in a saturated patch of color at the ends.
As I gaze closer, I notice that all along her pistil as well as at the base is a small sea of canary yellow tufts…a fluffy reminder that as beautiful as she is, she is also purposeful. She must attract bees and butterflies to aid in her survival.
All around her are rocks and hardened clay. The top of this peak has no protection against the harshness of winter. Rain pelts the ground and snow and ice often cover this barren place – only recently the temperatures have risen sufficiently to melt the snow and drain the rain water. How could something so beautiful patiently wait below a mean surface like this and yet emerge with such delightful contrast?
Today, in early March, the air is chilled and quite windy. As the gales whisk across the path, she bends and twists before stretching upright again. Her moves are sometimes violent, sometimes subtle and graceful. A choreography known only to her and the wind.
As I raise my eyes, I begin to see small dots of white and pink in crevasses and around the borders of the rocks. She is not alone up here. Her sisters dance along with the rhythm, a brilliant chorus line defining beauty out of chaos.
The magic of spring is not a new thing. The emergence of flowers has captured the human imagination and heart for eons.
In the beginning of Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth[1], Tolle connects the first emergence of flowers to a distinct evolutionary shift on our planet. He goes on to link flowers to human’s evolution of consciousness:
“As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics.”
He goes on to add:
Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature.
The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.
Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless.”
So it comes as no surprise to me that seeing these wonderful flowers dancing along on this peak makes me stop, dry the sweat from my brow, and gaze in wonder at each one.
In her, I recognize myself.
And so it is when we bear witness to these divine beings, we find the roots of our own divinity. We see and marvel at the birth of spring – and connect with the cycles of rebirth in our own lives. We are eager to transform and release the brilliance we may have guarded under our own rocky crust and snow-covered ridges.
Personally, this spring has presented an opportunity. After months of creative flow in the fall and early winter, I have felt sparse and dry. I would sit, pen poised above paper and feel nothing. Hear nothing. I might scratch out a few lines and then scribble them out. I waited and marinated in the experiences around me.
But I had nothing to say.
I was in dormancy.
Today is my birthday – truly. As Bobby and I started to climb that steep mountain trail, I sought inspiration in the clouds – in the winds – in the vast vistas offered to me at each turn. The startling thing is to see that the inspiration is here, right under my own feet…rooting deep in the mud and rocks.
And today my pen seems to move with more ease. This tiny colorful flower, what I now know is a Crocus versicolor, is awakening something in me, such that now between my in-breaths and out-breaths words are emerging – colors and textures too. I feel reinvigorated.
I am grateful for the chance to slow down and spend time “contemplating the flowers” as we are told to do. The energy flow of the planet moves and dances like the chorus line of crocuses on the mountain – and we can join in the movement if we are brave enough to open our vulnerable hearts.
Bisous,
Hanna
[1] Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Penguin Books, January 2008
40 Weeks in France 