Inspire your creative nature this season: join in for my upcoming workshops. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays in podcast form, share with a friend, or ground your writing practice with a journal from Odette Press. Support this publication with a forever discount.
Bud forms from stem, a circle. Then heat has its way, then soil, and the unfold of time. Sunlight draws down, unfolding petals in the repeating rhythms of a day and night. Stare into the eye of a flower. Watch it unfold, as if idea or moon, until it blooms brightly.
To start this essay, I sit at the table. Morning is low glow and early; my mind is slow, unfolding toward the white horizon of a blank page. Sitting, I open. Hips become petals and soft angles. Pausing, I breathe down, giving space to the faster pace of pulse and noticing. Exhale to slow. Holding the pen, my hand is a bud, and the movements of ink steady to form shape and sentence across the paper. Before the blank page I have no idea what will flower, only the desire to write, a vague seed of an idea. My thoughts go faster than my hand can write, students in my classes say. And sometimes the language of mind is to tend to ourselves with the steadiness of being our own teacher: trusting ourselves to open, handing ourselves a moment to flower.
I often speak in the language of hands. I make, I hold, I ground, I firm, I cup, I write, I gesture. I grip some days, and release. Palms and hands learn to speak in pressure and shape, in ripples and opening, a language as if they are full moon or flower petals budding. I stretch palms open and then closed after a day of typing, after long stretches of time writing by hand. A hand, like a flower, like a day is a dynamic language: a palm to halt, to stop, to cup, to open, to express, to make, to bring forward, while across the globe hands, shapes, and motions, and their signals have myriad meanings. Language, unfolding as flowers and time, is formed and shifted, adapted and created.
I emerge into morning and the world is green; I take the seed of an idea with me. Walking, I slow, noticing how nature is a constant change. Green spring: when magnolia trees drop their flowers. Branches, once bursting in pink, settle to leaves. Canopy becomes full, while time after bloom feels like a hush that shadows and steadies.
I cup flowers in open palms and awe at plants. I learn, they balm, they awe, they heal, and teach the practice of growing, shooting up from the roots both fast and slowly. Said to have originated ninety-five million years ago, magnolias, in particular, are ancient, said to be so ancient they came before bees, said to therefore necessitate pollination from beetles, a wisdom that knew the world before many modern species, and yet despite changes in climates, in cultures and maps, found ways to wild, to grow, to adapt. Looking into the leaves of magnolia trees, I wonder about what they could say if each flower could speak. Later, wonder tilts toward ancestors whose stories stretch out across deeper time than we can understand: what their hands touched, what they grew and made, what they fought, what they felt, what insights bloomed in their days.
Lately, I keep a palette of drying ink next to me while I’m working. Unprompted, unguided, I unfold leaf of new page often to unwind, to be with moment and color, to notice what emerges. Forming flowers from brush, these sketches prompt me to remember to turn toward the breeze, to find some shape and solace in sunlight. Again, again, again, shape as easy as breath, I find the language of landscape and flower repeating in the process of page and expressing.
In the evenings, I look to the bright white of unfolding flower, cloud-shrouded sun. Eyes widen as night falls, and I want to know what the moon would tell us in the evening light, what the lessons might be living in the wisdom of the bud of the earliest flowers forming on magnolia all those thousands of years in the past. Past, thousands of years before screens, before those and those and those and those who formed us were forming. I wonder what rose would say, or the lotus that hangs suspended above the surface of the mud below. I wonder often what the earth would say, and then catch myself: everything has a language, and everything communicates, but often these ancient forms speak in language beyond letters forming sentences. Illumination of understanding in nature is often drowned out by the illusion of speed and screens, glowing computers, loud repeated sounds, and the pulse of neon lights. No screens, no whirlwinds of thinking, across the expanses of deeper time many wisdom traditions at their core pointed us to each other, to the sky, to the earth, and into the inner worlds of our silent selves, giving language to speak to the mystery of existence. No wonder, then, earth’s language is often unseen, unheard, not felt, or unacknowledged. These languages require us to slow down and finely tune in to listen.
Moon blooms full and bright as I write. Moon illuminates nights and nights give rest, opening up into insight. I turn toward the now of petals, of sunlight, of fast and slow time, a planet’s trajectory tracing lines across sky. Sun, moon, stars in sky; all ancient like rose, lotus, magnolia. I think of the millennia, the amassments of millions of moments, thousands years of language, landscapes, insights that form like flowers and breaths that rise and fall across this horizon of time. Breath forms an inhale, around the mouth of astonishment, seeing the wild petal awe unfold of a peony, while roses ready, and finding inspiration in the petals like open palms of star magnolia. Dogwood, in its four petaled symmetry, shows me how to balance.
What can you learn from your breath, of turning toward your own pacing? As we steady and slow, we grow our noticing. Like a long stare in awe spanning the distance between you and flower, you and another, or moon, presence is generated. Your breath may steady. Your breath may sharp. Often, time slows. You pause and feel your body in space, rooted in awe, connected to the moment through the rhythm of heartbeat, time, and gravity. What speaks to you through your lineages, or the edges of your fingers? What flowers in the slow steadiness of your heart and mind? What stories were planted and pollinated, in time that was yours, and what originated from your lines and roots, in time beyond time beyond time beyond that? What do you open to now?
