Flowering Fridays: Inner Harvest

Taken at Franklin Park Conservatory, Columbus, Ohio, February 2009

Listen to the flowers.

They say,

"Go inward, touch the contours of your life.

Notice the texture and landscape of the recent cycle:

What bloomed? What remained under the safe soil of your heart?

It is a time of stillness and release.

The days are dark and loamy. It is time to go underground.

With your heart's ear you can hear the tulip opening its petals.

Go into your sacred center and see the unique shape you are, that your life is.

Pause to celebrate what has grown within you this year.

Remember to grieve what passed.

Wait with anticipation for the light that is being born within you.

Ask yourself:

what must be left behind to compost the next season of your life?

Then, dig deep and inquire across the gate of your soul:

what seeds must you carry, no matter how hard the soil of winter, no matter how long the icy journey, so that you may sow a verdant offering come spring?"

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With gratitude to the wisdom of the flowers, who offered these words as I journaled tonight...and with gratitude for the rhythms and musings from the poetic soul of John O'Donohue, who I am officially in big-time literary love with and have been reading and listening to all week.

Here are couple new O'Donohue audio finds here. (Scroll down to "In Case You Missed It" for a CBC and a Speaking of Faith interview). And on iTunes, I found a four-part RTÉ podcast interview with O'Donohue here.

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.