Flowerings Fridays: Where Does the Flower Go?

Michaelmas daisies in our meadow last week

Where does a flower go
Its petals so bright with the beauty of the sun

Where does a flower go
Nectar so sweet it makes the bees buzz

Where does a flower go
With beauty that fills a lover's heart

Where does a flower go
Wrinkling color that falls to the ground

Where does a flower go
Seeds that feed the birds in flight

Where does a flower go
The juice of the stem and leaves retreating back to mother earth

Where does a flower go
Roots resting in the soil

Where does a flower go
A blanket of white covering its bed

Where does a flower go
It lives in my eyes, nose, fingers, heart, and soul

Where does a flower go
It returns to shine and fill the universe with love again

It returns to me and all
— written by Paul Abler, a friend of mine in Future Thinking, in August when he heard about my mom and her illness

(Thank you, Paul. This poem has been such a gift to me!)

I am heading to Ohio on Saturday to be with my mom and family. She has been back in the ICU since last week and her condition continues to worsen. The doctor says that her lungs are "stiffening" from having ARDS and it's getting harder and harder for her to get oxygen. It is at the point where our family is looking at taking her off the ventilator and allowing her to finish her journey without its assistance. Such a hard place to be in — my mom is sedated and it is hard to know what her wishes are. I keep praying for guidance and wisdom and stand in the beautiful knowing that we never truly lose a flower — its beauty, love and blossom continues to shine always.

I also learned on Wednesday that my step-brother-in-law, Bill, has Stage IV lung cancer and was given 10 months to a year to live. (Sending so many prayers, love and healing light to him, my stepsister Jennifer and their two young kids).

Amid all this, we have been transforming the house. It has been a lot of work and late, late nights to get it there. (5 a.m.! 4 a.m.! 3 a.m.!) Thankfully, we've had a lot of help, too, and the house is looking amazing. Like a completely different house amazing. (I will post pictures soon.)

It is an understatement to say that's it has been a full week.

My opportunity with all that is going on is to see the love and support that is always there and to stay centered in that truth. It's not always easy (and I do forget and go into overwhelm), but it's something I'm committed to standing in.

Tell me, where you do think the flowers go?

Monday Musings: Love Begins at Home

Cut sunflower from backyard meadow with aphid still on

Do not wait for leaders.
Do it alone; person to person.
Love begins at home;
Love lives in homes, and so it should,
because that is where love begins..
Creating peace in the world,
begins by creating peace in the home.
We cannot do great things in the world...;
but we can do little things, with great love..
We think sometimes, that poverty is
being hungry, naked, and homeless..
The poverty of feeling unwanted,
unloved, and uncared for,
is the greatest of all poverty...
We must start in our own homes,
to remedy this kind of poverty..
The little things which we do
with great love for doing it;
are links that form a strong chain of Love.....
— Mother Teresa

(quote shared by my Danish friend on Facebook Helle Sjørslev, a woman who inspires me with her generous love-filled posts. Gotta love a person who lists their religion as "authentic love.")

We are in the home stretch of imbueing love and peace into our home so that it can go on the market next Monday and attract another family who will love it as much as we have. My intention for this week is to shower my home and my family with love.

Tell me, what's your intention for this week?

Flowering Fridays: The Interdependent Nature of Life

Grasshopper on dying Queen Anne's Lace in our meadow last week

One of my favorite joys in the garden is how the bees and the bugs interact with the flowers.

Watching the bees* dive into one flower and then the next, both getting food for the hive and pollinating the flowers in the process. (Watching them wriggle inside the snapdragons is my absolute favorite.)

Seeing the bugs use flowers for not only for food, but also for resting and nesting places. (How wonderful to be like this grasshopper with its cushion of Queen Anne's Lace to rest upon.)

For me, seeing all the life that comes into contact with flowers is a visual reminder of how interdependent we are.

Even when we think we are alone, we're not. Even we feel disconnected, we're not. Even when we think we don't matter in the scheme of things, we are absolutely essential to all of existence.

What I'm discovering, after many, many years of feeling alone and isolated is this:

We are each so special and unique and needed in life's beautiful garden that we are never forgotten. We are loved and supported every step of the journey.

Yeah, I've said that before. Many times. But it's worth repeating as it's an easy one to forget when the journey gets tough.

But we are supported. By the people around us. By people from far away. By forces we cannot see. By people we might not ever know.

Heck, I even feel supported by this grasshopper.

The reason: the symbolic message for the grasshopper is, according to this article by Ina Woolcott  "new leaps forward /leaps of faith /jumping without knowing where you will land, leaping over obstacles" and good luck and abundance. It's a message that feels most supportive to me right now.

Yesterday, there were four painters and one contractor working in the house.

Eight rooms, including the kitchen and its cabinets, were being painted while the contractor worked on finishing the upstairs bathroom.

Huddled in our bedroom with my head hurting from the fumes, I began to slip into thoughts of overwhelm and fear:

How will this all get done in the next week? What if no one buys our house? What if we are wasting all this time and money? What if we can never move?

Down and down the spiral of negative thinking I went.

Then I saw this picture of the grasshopper.

And I remembered I don't have to do this all by myself.

I have support.

The support of my husband, my brother, my mother and father-in-law, plus a great team of helpers for the project from our awesome realtor and the great stager/decorator she's hired to the painters and contractor. To name but a few.

The support of finding the perfect people to release our "stuff" in an easy way. (God bless our friend Annette who joyfully hauled away a whole garage-full of unwanted items and sorted through them all.)

And, there's the millions of other supporters who I don't know by name, but who are supporting me on this journey nonetheless — from the person who invented packing tape to the color design team at Sherwin-Williams to whomever invented Priceline so I could find cheap and paint-fume-free rooms for us to stay in for the next few nights.

Once you start looking for support, you could literally spend your whole lifetime listing all the support you have.

It reminds me that we are so not alone and how interconnected the web of existence really is.

Tell me, who are you grateful to for support today?

 * An interesting fact I learned about bumblebees today from Wikipedia:

"....when flying a bee builds up an electrostatic charge, and as flowers are usually well grounded, pollen is attracted to the bee's pile when it lands. When a pollen covered bee enters a flower, the charged pollen is preferentially attracted to the stigma because it is better grounded than the other parts of the flower." (How cool is that!)

************* 

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.