Note: This post was published on Facebook July 7th, and I am adding it to my blog belatedly. The references to Our Lady of Woodstock are one of a myriad of names for Our Great Earth Mother, by any name you like to call Her.
“Once, all knowledge was the knowledge of a flower.” -Our Lady of Woodstock March 16th, 2019
I had a dream the other night that showed me that flowers once were, and still are, our maps. There were layers of interconnecting and circling maps, endlessly sliding over each other, in the illogical way of dreams, and somehow, I knew they were made by the flowers.
“It has been a long time since you experienced wildness—so long in fact that you have forgotten what it is. None of your myths or legends, scriptures or stories can reach back as far as the wild.” Also from Our Lady of Woodstock, March 16th, 2019
When we were wild, the flowers literally guided us. They would lead us to food, and they would show us the next step on our path. We learned to watch and listen to them closely. The flowers migrated early in each climate change cycle, long before animals and humans felt the need to move, and they would lead us to where we needed to go, slowly, over generations. Studies are now showing that many plants are already on the move to higher elevations with the changes in our climate today, already creating new maps for us.
Long before humans, flowers knew what they needed to do to survive. With 125 million years of travel under their belt, the flowers have more knowledge than we can possibly imagine. We are only one of their latest partners in their ever-evolving ways of creating new generations of life. They truly have the view of the long story, as Perdita Finn calls it, the eons of evolutionary ebbs and flows. For millennia, flowers have been leading us and weaving us together with them in ways we barely understand, but somehow instinctively know.
The flowers were experts at harnessing the life force of the sun and the dirt millions of years before humans came along. They wooed our ancestors, fed them, loved them, and had them swooning over their beauty. When flowers first evolved, they brought myriads of variations of color and beauty to a world that had only been wet and green in the eons before. Shortly after they came into the world, other life forms exploded exponentially, like insects and bees, and the first mammals appeared. The dance between flowers and bees is one of the longest and most exquisite love letters ever written. They even taught the birds – those remnants of dinosaurs after the last great extinction – to sing. This flower explosion that began all those millennia ago is the great mystery of eros, sex, love, and devotion to and from Our Great Mother, the Earth, that is beyond our comprehension. The flowers are nothing more and nothing less than the greatest love story ever told.
My heart and soul bursts with the contemplation of this great mystery, the love story of the flowers. I sometimes wish I could literally explode into flower myself. What would it feel like to be able to funnel that mystical devotional prayer of life force energy out through the ends of my fingers? To be so in love with the sun, the bees, the air, the wind, the rain, all the flora and fauna, that the energy bursts forth from my fingertips in a riot of sensual, fragrant color? What would it mean for my whole life purpose to be focused on this love letter? A message portrayed by beauty and color that says, “I want to be your lover. Dive deep into me and dance with me in ecstasy. This connection is all that matters, right here, right now.”
Before “The Fall,” before we evolved to became aware of our separateness, the flowers were our maps, our direction signs for our very life. Now the flowers lead our souls. They lead us back to ourselves, to our hearts. And, they tell us, we will need to trust them again to be our physical maps in a changing world. They are and will always be the hands of our Great Mother. They are speaking and we are called to listen and learn their wild language, so they can share their knowledge with us. We all have the ability to do this inside of us.
Our Lady of Woodstock says, “But you can no more lose your wildness than you can lose your shadow on a sunny day. You can no more escape your true nature than the mind can leave its place within the body and take up residence somewhere else. You live in this world, and you are the world, with all of its green and growing things—its animals and birds and fishes, its wind and water, dust, dirt, rock, and sand. You are nothing but these, and they are you. Your wildness is the only true mirror of the world.” Our Lady of Woodstock, March 16th, 2019
Further reading:
Otherlands: a Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell
Song of Increase by Jacqueline Freeman
“But you can no more lose your wildness than lose your shadow on a sunny day” and all your words, Mary… weaving this wild remembering together for us. And I love this collage. Thank you!