The Roses Are Mothers

Teaching us to desire life one petal at a time

Reaching for a big, fully open pink Rose in my grandmother’s garden is one of my first memories, and only now do I realize what a gift that was, to have Rose with me so early in my life. I have been wedded to Roses from my very beginning, like the human species has been, ever since they reached for their first flower. 

 Roses, the flower-mothers bound closest to our soul, offer us beauty to bring us back into connection and harmony with the rest of our kin—all the plants and animals and rocks and waters that we inhabit together in this living ecosystem we call Earth. Beauty is a gift of endless grace from all these mothers. The Roses want nothing more for us than to be devoted to each other—to each living thing on our planet—as a mother is devoted to her child, and a child is devoted to their mother.

Roses have given up so much for us just like any mother does. While they grieve the diminished vitality of so many of their species in recent centuries, these Rose mothers have a secret that sustains them. The roots of the wild five-petaled roses—the strongest and oldest of their species—are used by horticulturalists as rootstock for the myriad of hybrid varieties that are grafted onto them. The Rose mothers know this ensures that they do not lose the wisdom of their ancestors. Knowing how to survive any number of calamities is still held in the roots of every rose plant grown today. Interestingly, the wild rose roots will often overgrow the variety grafted on to them. In less than a decade, an unattended rose bush will often revert to its original rootstock that is always a species of the five-petaled wild rose. They never forget how to rewild themselves!

Rose teaches us desire is good and holy. Desire is the voice of our hearts, and in desiring the Rose we can hear the voice of our heart. Rose holds a portal open for us—a way into our heart—bypassing our minds that so often override our feelings and our intuitive sense. When we surrender to the Rose, to the desire for life they arouse in us, we are surrendering to our animal bodies, surrendering to our deepest selves, trusting the Rose and the Earth to mother us, and learning to mother each other in return.

Roses have sometimes been worshipped too much, have been put on a pedestal that makes them more sacred and holy than other plants or beings. Roses are our kin who welcomed us into their family long ago—they don’t want to be worshipped or sacrificed any more than a human mother does. Worship leads to excesses of religion, money, status, and hierarchy that always inevitably come in a top-down structure. Rather, the Roses enjoy being an embodied living symbol of our devotion to all that is Sacred—to all that we love. Devotion is not worship. Devotion is reverence, an expression of love; it is loyal and collaborative. The Rose just wants to mother us, and be mothered by us in return, acknowledging our deep soul courtship.

Touching our memories of when we were in our mother’s womb, the Rose triggers our deepest longings to be reunited again with that sacred union we had before we became fully incarnated in this life. Having dreamt us into being, the Roses nurse us with longing, feed us beauty, and offer us a refuge. They teach us to desire life one petal at a time, never giving up, returning each spring to teach us that we also always return to new life.

Mother Rose says, “Call to me—call my name—and you will soon smell my scent wafting nearby. My fragrance will always come to you when you ask, even when my flower cannot. We are bound together, you and I, and we can only go forward together, mothering each other. When you allow me to mother you, to bring you home, your feet will know where to grow roots, and your heart will remember that you are Sacred.”

Seeing beauty in our world is critical to renewing our reverence for our home—learning to mother our planet again—as She has mothered us. Roses are the standard bearer for this quest of seeing beauty in a way that restores us. When we “stop to smell the roses” we literally take the first step to relearn how to communicate with the natural world, with an ecosystem we are an integral part of. The Rose never gives up on us. What would life feel like if we allowed Rose’s beauty to be the lens that we see the world through today, more deeply than we ever have before?

Sitting with a Rose bush in my backyard, I reach out, offering a prayer, as I ask them: “Mother Roses, what are you birthing now? What are you dreaming into being? After what seems like such a long labor, how do you continue to find the strength to sustain yourself? To sustain us? Because truly, you do sustain us as we hurtle towards our future. Thank you for mothering us, loving us through all we have wrought, and never giving up hope that all our kind will see you as you see us—alive, sacred, sentient, and part of an incredibly animate universe. May we truly learn to mother you as you have mothered us.”