The Perfect Match
Our Ache for Deep Connection
Can I call on a cacophony of sweet, scent filled magnolia memories, wafting through time? They are not simply something we love because they are pretty and smell delightful. The magnolias love us unabashedly just as a grandmother does. When I can set aside the deep belief of our civilization—that we humans are superior to all other forms of life—everything changes. The magnolias are my elders, and I become the child, with much to learn from them.
Whenever I am near a magnolia tree, I sense an incredible comfort—even an unconditional love—emanating from them, and I am reminded of sitting in my grandmother’s lap, reading Peter Rabbit stories. Perhaps because my own mother was emotionally distant, I am primed to see mothers in all beings around me now. But it took five decades of my life before I realized what was missing. It was just the way I was raised. I knew my mother loved me, and I was well cared for, but it is an odd thing to have no memories of being held by my mother. Now, as I am standing under a magnolia tree in bloom, I can feel their petals wrapping around me, like a long-lost embrace. To know that Magnolia loves me like a mother is revelatory.
When my son was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, my carefully constructed world imploded. I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff staring into an abyss with only one small sapling to grab hold of—one that could not carry my weight. I couldn’t feel any loving arms ready to catch me, human or otherwise. That container of self-reliance I had built now only served to separate me from the arms of the family and friends I needed most. Joined together in our deepest fear, there was only so much my husband and I could do to help each other. The realization that I had no bedrock to support me was terrifying.
With much grace, medical science, prayers and time, our son is now a healthy adult. We were so very blessed and fortunate. But I will never forget that yawning abyss—the one that cracked open my heart the hard way. While I would give most anything for my son not to have experienced his sickness, that crack ultimately has led me back to my own heart and my heart’s desire, as not long after I began to seek again as I had in my teenage years—questioning much and exploring my creativity for the first time since college. My lifelong love of plants resurfaced like a geyser, and the huge open arms of the magnolia in my yard offered themselves to me unconditionally.
Each spring now, when magnolia’s soft velvety flower buds start to push out of their leaf tips, I can feel my heart begin to soften with them, already anticipating and remembering the swoon-worthy richness of their fragrance that will soon come. I am always grateful that they have found a way to continue this dance for over a hundred million years—an inconceivable length of time compared to the one million years or so that the Homo genus has been evolving. When they shed the soft furry coat that shields their blossoms, and begin to open their large, luscious petals, they invite me to open my own vulnerable heart with them. Without any shame or fear to hold them back, they freely offer me their embodied eros.
While the beauty of the magnolia flower alone is enough to make me speechless, their luscious, deeply fragrant scent completely overrides my rational thought and sends me reveling deep into my animal body. Delicately rose sweet, yet with the fresh clarity of citrus—it is the quintessential scent of late spring romance for me. I want to crawl into their flower, curl up and stay there, wrapped in their strong soft petals with their scent intimately washing over me, stroking my naked skin. As magnolia’s scent wafts under my nose, they open an ancient doorway that shifts time, and a brief glimpse flashes through my mind’s eye of the long procession of all those magnolias who have come before, one magnolia mother after another.
Magnolia said to me: “I am an ancient, deeply fragrant memory that you hold in your heart. Feel my primordial unconditional love being offered to you. Let me be a safe place, a stronghold for you, as you open your heart wider. Trust your deep knowing that you are divine and allow your love for yourself to be unconditional as well.”
The first time I met the magnolia’s flowers I was living in North Carolina while I was at college. I will never forget being literally stopped in my tracks one morning when a deeply fragrant breeze suddenly enveloped me. Following my nose to a stand of towering magnolia trees covered in huge creamy blossoms, I stood there with my mouth hanging open in awe. I was flooded with feelings—an ache--that I didn’t understand at the time. It took me decades to know that the niggling feeling I felt comes from encountering an ancient life force wisdom that is eons old—one that I hear through the plants.
Oh, that ache. That deep desire for connection. I know I have longed for it all my life, and I have an inkling I have received more than I know—that I am immersed in life’s interwoven threads so intricately that I am not even aware of most of them. And yet the ache exists still—a dance between a fear of that connection and the deep longing for it. How long have the flowers been teaching us that this is the yearning that fuels everything? Is this the feeling the beetles—their first pollinator—had one hundred million years ago? Drawn to a scent they could not resist but didn’t know why?
When Magnolia’s large off-white petals first unfurl, they expose their juicy stigmas—the female receptors for pollen. Hailing at the ends of a curling profusion of glistening tendrils that beckon ever-so-sensually, they are unabashedly calling in their mate, the perfect pollen.
Magnolia says: “I call the beetles to bring in the perfect match to my fragrant song, as I offer my heart and hearth to them in return. When they dance all around the juicy opening to my womb, bringing the pollen from another tree, we share the joy of a mutual reciprocity and bonding forged so many millions of years ago. We ache for it each spring until we find each other.”
When magnolia began opening their blossoms about 35 million years before bees evolved from their meat-eating wasp ancestors, they worked with the neighbors they had. They called out to the older beetles, who apparently were—and still are—willing to eat most anything. They offered them sweet-smelling protein-rich pollen and a warm home to hang out in overnight. They made their petals tough enough, so they were not damaged by the beetles’ gnawing mandibles while somehow keeping them velvety soft at the same time. It feels a bit like Beauty and the Beast – this love story between magnolias and beetles.
Beetle had been catching the briefest, faintest scent all day. Not enough yet to aim their directional sense, but enough to make them drool. This was the scent that lived in their genes from one generation to the next. The one the DNA of their mother whispered into their heart. The scent that would truly nourish them, feed them in ways no other food could because of the bond that bound them together, a bond of the life force energy that we sometimes call love, ensuring their own genes would live on. They only knew that as long as there had been beetle ancestors, this was the scent they lived for each spring. And finally, there it was, strong and true, pulling them forward as fast as they could go.
How long—how many generations—did it take magnolias to produce just the right scent to lure the beetles, to learn that it was the protein in their pollen that they really wanted? This courtship is so intricately orchestrated, a love story of epic proportions. Think of it as an intricate dance, rather than a science lesson, with the steps learned over millions and eons of years.
What if the magnolias didn’t just accidentally fall into something mutually beneficial with the beetles, but instead, have been in deep communication with their ecosystems about their desires and longings from the beginning of their evolution? What if all humans and animals are not so separate from plants after all, but are simply complementary halves of a whole? Afterall, they breathe in carbon dioxide we exhale; they exhale oxygen we breathe in. They eat sunlight, we eat the sugars they have made from sunlight. We feed each other both in our living and in our dying. This pollination dance of magnolias and beetles is only one of millions of remarkable love stories between the plant and animal kingdoms.
The movie, The Princess Bride, ends with this line: “Since the invention of the kiss there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.” But the narrator does not tell us what those other 5 kisses were. I suspect they included “the more than human world,” as David Abram says. What if the beetle kissing the magnolia was one of them? The attraction between such very different beings on our Earth has been critical to the growth of life on our planet, like the kiss between algae and fungi to make lichen. Or like the kiss between the mycelium and the first land plants that enabled them to root themselves into the dirt. Or even the first kiss of the Sun upon the waters of the Earth.
You never fail to make the world open up just a little more each time I read what you've shared.
When my mother, the love of his life was dying, my father greeted the Magnolia tree on the opposite street corner from their apartment each day with awe and reverence.