Bejeweled Imagination

Flinging our seeds with wild abandon out into the world...

I find myself dreaming of West Virginia summers now that the first hints of spring have arrived amidst the returning light.

When jewelweed begins to bloom, with their dainty, spotted orange flowers hanging like pendants from small slender stems, I will know mid-summer has fully arrived, and I am being invited home to my favorite shady creeks and mountain streams.

Brightening the edges of forests in large stands, they sway together like a green wave rippling in the sun, bejeweled with amber sparkles. Favoring moist semi-shady spots, “jewels” of water often collect on the edges of their soft green leaves. Their delicate watery stems are transparent and tender, full of soothing sap that is traditionally used to calm the fiery rashes bestowed by their nearby neighbors—stinging nettle and poison ivy. Bees love to crawl all the way into the mouth-like openings of their flowers, disappearing completely for a minute or more. Both the bees and hummingbirds thrive on their nectar.

Jewelweed says: “I see the dappled afternoon sun shining on your face like it does on mine. Do you hear us calling you to join us? Feel our open arms inviting you to slow down, stop and come sit with us for a while in our sanctuary. We offer the sap of our juicy stems to soothe you and welcome you into our community of calm, deep slowness. Know that you are home and truly nourished. At last, you can release everything that you no longer need to hold, as easily as my seed releases from their pod with the slightest touch.”

As jewelweed’s flowers ripen into mature seed pods, they will burst open at the tiniest tap, shooting their seeds in all directions several feet away, earning them another of their common names—touch-me-nots. I had forgotten this name for them that I knew as a child, until I experienced their magical seed pods decades later again as an adult and realized this plant I know now as jewelweed, is the same plant with the magical touch-me-not seeds I knew then.

Coming across a stand of jewelweed full of seed pods, I was suddenly four years old again, reaching out my soft child’s finger and squealing in anticipation, trepidation, and wonder—touching one after another, over and over again. Their pods would snap open, pulling into curls, and the coiled energy would unleash a rapid-fire spray of seeds up to three feet away.

I remember feeling like they were just waiting for me to play with them. I would try to watch closely as I touched them ever so slightly, sending their seeds to new homes. To me at the time it was like playing a game of hide and seek; once I tagged them, the seeds would spring out and run away to hide again. I remember imagining worlds of orange fairy-flower beings and their tiny fairy-seed babies scattering all around me, frolicking for new cover, squealing with delight.

Did these flowers introduce me to fairies first, or did the books that I loved?

As I grew older and began to read, I remember often being much more comfortable living in other people’s imaginations than my own. Beatrix Potter, J. M. Barrie, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, JR Tolkien, and Mary Stewart were some of the authors whose books I devoured and imagined myself inside their stories. By the time I was in middle school, however, I remember thinking I just didn’t have much imagination. I wonder now how much I had taken in messages to only trust what was “real?” With a strong desire to “fit in” and be a good girl, I took my mother’s lead to be practical and logical like she was. Interestingly, my dad was more imaginative, and daydreamed with me as a child, but in my teen years, it was my mother who encouraged me to be creative, while my father had become concerned that I learn to support myself. Thankfully, the books, the flowers and the forest never stopped inviting me into their worlds.

When we begin to tell our children, and our elders with dementia, what is real and what isn’t—what realms, what ways of being, feeling and understanding are we denying? By stifling their imagination, are we also suppressing their feelings, their creativity and even their heart’s desires? It is not just our professional artists, writers, and musicians who are creative. We are all creative. We are all imaginative. We all have deep feelings. It is our birthright to follow our heart’s desire. In fact, it’s imperative that we do.

Jewelweed, my many other flowers friends, and the myriads of houseplants I talked my mom into buying when I was nine and ten, were already calling me into other worlds. With them I felt free to bypass the expectations, the shoulds, the need for acceptance, and fear of being mocked, that were so stifling to my imagination, intuition, and creativity, although I couldn’t articulate that then. I only knew that when I was with my plant friends, I could allow my imagination to wander.

Jewelweed says: “I am here to help you cultivate a haven outside of time where your imagination can become real again. Step into the forgotten sanctuary of your daydreams amidst my swaying stands of bright orange flowers and enter your childhood worlds of small people, fairies, and long-held memories of home held in your heart, where you can remember who you have been and who you want to be.”

Flowers have truly taught me to trust my imagination again as an adult. When I began to hear their messages, I dismissed them at first. Then for a while, I feared them, because they felt so much bigger than me. What would be asked of me if I accepted them and trusted them? I wondered many times if I was just making them up. Then one day someone asked me to consider, what if it didn’t matter whether I was making them up or not? What if my imagination was real, simply another part of the realms we inhabit? And suddenly, the doubt my mind kept holding over me no longer mattered. The line between imagination and “the real world” began to blur and co-exist. I could allow both. I had permission to trust my heart. It was like a light switch. “Just my imagination” was no longer a part of myself I dismissed.

I have come to trust the nudges, the ideas, the flowers, the memories, the people, that pop into my mind unexpectedly as messages I need to follow, as guidance from my intuition, my beloved dead, my muse, the divine, the universe, my heart—really by whatever name works for me at the time. I trust them more than my own logical thought processes much of the time, especially when the way ahead is unclear, because I feel they are coming from more expansive, interdimensional worlds that are open to more possibilities than my logical mind is capable of.

Our imagination and our intuition are intricately connected. When I allow my intuition to use my imagination as a messenger, the vastly different language of the flowers begins to open to me. The flowers speak slowly, though. So very slowly. It may take days or weeks or longer to begin to know why they have caught our attention, why they keep niggling into us with an idea we can’t quite grasp yet. Our imagination and intuition are crucial tools for expanding our field of understanding outside our normal human-centric view.

Before I would allow myself to accept what the flowers were sharing with me—to trust my intuition and imagination—I had to face a lot of my fears, as I often still do. I was afraid of being dismissed as crazy, illogical, not practical, or even of being called a witch. The human need for acceptance, to not be ostracized and thrown out of the village, is so innate and strong. Any suggestion that our flowers and plants and our planet themselves are sentient has been laughed at for several centuries now, especially in the modern world of science. Tragically, this prejudice immediately shuts down our imagination and intuition, and cuts us off from the interactions and wisdom of other species that our ancestors experienced for millennia.

Intuition is a muscle—and so is our imagination. It took practice for me to begin to trust them and be open to them. Learning to trust the uncertainty of our intuition is counter to everything we are taught in school—where we are taught to trust facts provided by others, rather than to learn to trust our hearts and our intuitive imagination. Our imagination is a portal that opens doors and allows us to hear the world around us answering our heart’s desires.

Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is greater than knowledge. Knowledge is limited and imagination encompasses the cosmos."

When jewelweed invites me to touch their seed pods, setting off explosions of possibilities, I am stepping into the space where I can allow anything to happen, and dream of where I want to be. I know their home will keep me safe as I dream. There are no “shoulds” when I am held by jewelweed—only the excitement of infinite possibilities. And if I can allow my imagination to have infinite possibilities, I can also allow my heart to desire what it truly desires.

Once, I brought some jewelweed seed home to my garden, and it did grow, but not with the same lush vitality and wild abandon that they have in the wild woods. In my garden they were pale, and solitary, and rather sad. Like our imagination, jewelweed needs to be wild and uninhibited, and able to choose where their roots are deeply nourished.

It will take all our collective imaginations to change how our culture perceives this Earth that sustains us. Our imagination is one of our greatest strengths, a gift we are given to create new maps to lead us to the homes that truly nourish us. When we gather with jewelweed in the dappled shade beside the mountain streams, we can feel safe enough to play, to imagine, to create, to intuit, and discover new ways to fling our seeds, our creations, and our desires out into the world.

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