Finding Our Balance

What can a flower teach me about a hurricane?

I’ve been thinking a lot about balance lately. After riding a bubble of several great things happening in my work with the flowers, I came down with covid and then the hurricanes started happening. With my life feeling more like a rollercoaster lately than I like, my innate urge for balance has been working overtime.

I usually recognize that when I get sick, my body wants me to slow down, but this time the message feels bigger, deeper, and older. I sense I am to listen deeply into these storms that have or will be, upending the lives of so many. Two huge hurricanes in two weeks have opened a gaping abyss in any illusion of predictable normalcy and safety in our carefully curated lives. 

Interestingly, what is at the center of a hurricane is an “eye”—a place of relative still and calm—while the rest of the storm rages all around it. Looking at pictures of hurricanes from above shows these eyes and the storm’s mesmerizing spiral patterns that are quite beautiful. Spirals are natural patterns found throughout nature in every size imaginable. They are also an ancient symbol found all over the world in both ancient and modern cultures representing the cycles of life, death and rebirth.

There is a balanced feeling looking at a hurricane from above, and its structure is very “organized” in storm parlance, even though it creates so much destruction for our human created structures, and sometimes our very lives. How can something that is so beautiful from one perspective cause so much chaos? On the other hand, from the perspective of the Earth, how can one species, namely humans, cause so much disruption and chaos to the Earth’s beautifully self-regulating systems? A hurricane is simply seeking its own balance, and balance for the Earth, something it has been doing for eons longer than we have been building civilizations.

As I watch this latest hurricane unfold its story, feeling the tension of impending disaster build, I wonder if expanding my understanding of chaos can help my body relax. The world was formed out of the chaos, after all, as many of our creation myths tell us. Seeing the larger patterns of the Earth—its cycles and seasons of destruction and renewal—helps me to feel calmer, knowing there is always new life. Until, of course, the chaos that the storm brings becomes personal. Until it harms people I know and love. Until it hurts so many people that the pain of their suffering is hard to bear. The only way I can walk through these mysteries is by trusting our Mother Earth’s vast wisdom and holding Her hand. Tightly, with a fierce grip.

I went for a walk in the woods to pray the rosary recently, after several days of watching the apocalyptic disasters unfolding in western North Carolina. Strangely for me, I found myself almost unable to bring any hope into my prayers—something I’ve rarely felt. It was hard to hope for new beginnings when I had been sitting with the devastation for so long. The feeling of “when is the next shoe going to drop” was so palpable, and perhaps my body knew something I didn’t yet, because the next day another major hurricane formed in the Gulf of Mexico.

As I struggled with this mystery, I realized, all I needed to know right now was what small thing, what bit of joy or hope could I see today? I didn’t need to see the big picture, what would “fix” everything. I only needed to see what glimmer was making its way through the cracks, right here, right now. The miracle is that when I can shift myself outside of time, a resurrection is always there waiting for me. 

At that moment in the woods, I looked down and found myself gazing on a Queen Anne’s lace flower, even though they are usually gone by this time of the season. Perhaps this one waited to bloom until the unusual summer drought came to an end. Gazing at its beauty, I realized it looked like the hurricane satellite pictures I had been gazing at for too many days. It even had its own tiny red “eye” in the center. The small, cloud-like white florets made swirling patterns that also spun counterclockwise like the hurricane. But there is no chaos for us unfolding underneath this flower, other than perhaps their abundant seeds taking over our manicured lawns.

I wondered, what seeds might the hurricane be planting? And then I wondered—if I think like that, am I just bypassing the unfolding horror? Glossing over the suffering of millions? Then the answer came that while praying for, witnessing, experiencing and helping with the devastations in all the ways possible is vitally important, if I can also stretch time, step outside of time, and be present to the glimmers in the cracks—this is where the miracles happen, and new ways forward are revealed.

Our Earth has had a climate well balanced for us for over ten thousand years—not too hot, not too cold, but for the most part, just right—like in the Goldilocks story. For much longer than we have had written history, this relatively comfortable and reliable environment is what we have known. Now with the climate rapidly changing, throwing us off kilter, how do we change, how do our bodies adapt to something we haven’t experienced for millennia?

All I know is to turn to the flowers. Time stretches when I am in their presence and they speak so clearly of the new life that always returns, day after day, season after season, epoch after epoch. The cosmos that is held in a Queen Anne’s lace flower. When they die at the end of a season, they live in their seeds, in their roots, on the other side of the veil, ready to be reborn into this world again.

I pray to stretch my sense of time, to expand my feeling of balance, to help me understand these cycles; to know this wisdom the flowers know from millions of years of ever-evolving change that is their constant, their lifeblood. I pray to know in my heart that nothing can ever stay the same. To stay the same is to remain stagnant and die. To create new life, the old lives must change, must die. And I pray for my heart to enlarge enough to hold the hope of this long story, AND to bear witness to the pain of all those lives I share my worlds with.

I don’t have the answers, so I hold my beads, I hold Her hand, and I pray. Blessed Mama, please hold me and all those around me. Please help me know Your long story in my bones. Please show me my next step.

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