Keeping It Simple, Germinating in Wonder
Can we be wonderstruck and still get the dishes done? Also, a new workshop offering, and a giveaway!
What is it that happens when wonder grabs us, and causes us to stand with our mouth open, eyes wide, suddenly more alive than we remember, agog with awe?
When wonder happens for me, time slows or stops, a portal opens and a realization, a connection, an intuitive knowing comes over me. Goosebumps often rise on my skin, and a general feeling of heightened aliveness washes over me. A subtle shift takes me to a place where I feel that second of eternity, of life endlessly recreating itself. I sense the sacredness of everything in a new or deeper way than my mind usually allows me to.
Maria Popova, in her brilliant newsletter The Marginalian says this about wonder:
“We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering the singularity we once were and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars —…we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.”
Flowers hold all this wonder, embracing for each of us all the possibilities of who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming. The potentialities are endless and yet they are also excruciatingly simple because our minds prefer to analyze and name everything that it perceives. We forget, most of the time, the vast wisdom, the deep knowing that happens in a single second of awe-struck wonder.
What is wonder, if not also the feeling of falling instantly in love? These feelings of awe embody our original evolutionary love story, our most basic desire for Life. So simple, yet, as Maria Popova muses, how do we deal with the mundane, and experience as much wonder as possible—and the joy it brings—all in the same day?
For me it is the flowers who continually remind me of the possibility of a holding both—of falling into awe and getting the dishes washed. With both wide-open hearts and roots in the dirt, the flowers share the very life force of creation with every seed they make and every flower that blooms. I keep a potted plant by my sink to remind me to keep my own heart open.
Lately, Pink Lady Slipper is the wildflower that continues to surprise me and pull me into wonder, even now in the midst of winter. Due to their rarity, I have yet to meet this flower in their home in the woods. Yet, images of them and a longing to directly experience them are enough to lure my heart into their deep-time dance through the forest. I find myself dreaming, a young girl skipping with them through the forest on tippy-toe, full of joy, wonder—and in the way of dreams—fluidly connected and held in a deeper way than my waking mind allows.
The Ojibwe people tell a legend of the Pink Lady Slipper that begins with the daughter of a tribal chief. When the people of her village fall sick and begin to die, the young girl decides to run through a cold wintery night to the neighboring village for medicine. She loses her moccasins, but continues on, bloodying her feet and leaving a trail behind her. In the spring the bloody footprints are sprout up Pink Lady Slipper flowers, and all her people return to health. The Ojibwe people’s name for these flowers translates to “moccasin shoes,” and the people ever after revere these oddly shaped flowers as symbols of bravery, love and healing.
Hanging from the top of a foot high stalk rising above two broad leaves, the solitary pink flower has a large pouchlike structure that is the “moccasin.” When a bumble bee comes to visit and crawls into the small hole at the top of the pouch, they find themselves trapped for a while, dispersing and receiving pollen before they find their way out again. The delicate appearance of these flowers belies their feral nature that can only survive in the wild. Each plant often lives to fifty years of age if their habitat is not disturbed, after a long germination process growing from seed. They only grow in a symbiotic relationship with a particular fungus in the dirt, in acidic forests where pines, red maples and sweetgum trees grow. Pink Lady Slipper knows exactly what will nourish them best.
Each facet of their growth is an opportunity for wonder, from the first bud of their leaves poking through the dirt in spring, to the releasing of their seed as they wither in late autumn. The miracle of wonder is first in the recognition, and then the experience, and each time these encounters generate seeds of future possibilities. Seeds that carry our desires for the deep soul connections that we have glimpsed in these moments of wonder. The beauty we see, the love we feel, the ah-ha moments, all remind us that we are truly souls having a sacred human sensory experience in a body, and we are all connected.
I am offering a new five-week workshop, Guidance from the Flowers: Germinating Winter Wisdom, starting Wednesday January 15th, 2025, offered from 7:30 to 9:00pm Eastern. Participants are limited to 20 people.
The flowers invite us to dream with them, entwining the seeds of their becoming with our own. Winter will be a POWERFUL time to connect with the flowers as we explore germinating together and what wisdom they are offering to us.
In this live zoom-based five-part workshop, we will connect with the ancient wisdom of the flowers by exploring our entwined evolutionary love story, learn about their radical intelligence so different from our own, and empower ourselves to use our intuition and imagination to hear their messages.
Through stories, science and shared experiences we will explore how flowers are the elders who midwifed us into this world and want to nurture us still. Together we will gently, slowly, and convincingly step into their world and begin to understand what the flowers have to share with us when we shift from talking about flowers in third person to welcoming them into our conversations as respected elders.
Learn MORE, to REGISTER, and read the FULL DETAILS of this course offering HERE.
In this course, you will:
Gain a felt sense of the long evolutionary story of our planet and how the flowers are our elders with so much wisdom to share that is eons older than our own.
Learn how much guidance is available to us from the flowers, and how to allow ourselves to receive it and trust it to support ourselves and our loved ones.
Redefine plants and flowers as sentient, unpack centuries of human hubris as the only intelligent creatures and explore the possibilities that open when we see the world around us from other beings’ points of view.
Explore how it is collaboration between all life forms, so much more than survival and competition, that drives our evolution and holds the vast webs of our ecosystems together.
Hear about the latest science in plant intelligence in an easy, intriguing and digestible manner.
Be given tools to explore and trust our imagination and intuition – the key methods for communicating with all the non-human world.
Be slowly escorted through a step-by-step process to connect with the flowers and receive their wisdom, guidance and support for your everyday life.
Deepen our awe and wonder of flowers and the natural world all around us.
Gain a greater understanding of why reverence for our natural world is key to our future.
And much more…
The flowers are speaking, asking us to remember and resurrect our entwined evolutionary love story. Please consider joining the conversation!
Enter my giveaway on Instagram! You can win a copy of the first edition of my SOLD OUT oracle cards - The Flowers Are Speaking Oracle Cards & Guidebook. FIVE MORE DAYS to enter, until January 1st at midnight. TO ENTER, you must go to my Instagram account @marytalkstoflowers, and follow HOW TO ENTER guidelines on my PINNED POST, that include following me on IG, telling me your favorite flower in comments and tagging a friend. Good luck!
Oh wow! I love that he did that so much. Thank you for sharing! We need more people like him.
My botanist grandfather once had a major Hwy rerouted in order to save a rare patch of pink lady’s slippers. This was in north Georgia.