Trusting the Message
Breaking loose from cultural and self-imposed boundaries around our hearts
I am longing for the imminent return of my passionate and unrestrained bleeding hearts who invite me to dance with them each spring. Will you join me in my vigil to await their arrival?
When bleeding hearts emerge from the dirt, barely thawed from the dark of winter, their seemingly delicate fronds quickly push up out of the soil and soon bear the buds of their first blooms. Like a young maiden naively sure of the beauty of the world, they have no fear of the frost. They love the early spring light of the sun that is not yet strong and teases them out of the ground with promise. Like the ancient vestal virgins, they are sure of themselves, sensuous and regal. The original meaning of the word virgin was simply young woman, not married, and hence whole unto herself. Like them, bleeding heart literally brings us the wholeness of their vibrant hearts, with unbridled passion.
Hanging at the tip of their graceful stems, the newest blooms are small heart-shaped flowers with a larger arrow-shaped structure that hangs down. As they mature, the arrow shape splits in two, as if they are pulling up their skirts, exposing the delicate inner blood drop bleeding from the end. Rather than protecting their hearts from fear of the spring frost, they are bursting forth with desire, ready to share the seeds of their abundant joy and exuberance with the world.
Like many gardeners, my body knows so much more than I do when I am kneeling close to the ground watching new life burst forth from the mysterious substance we call dirt. One sunny spring day I was sitting with the new blooms of bleeding hearts, in a bit of a meditative trance, and images of May Day and Beltane dancing came into my mind’s eye. There were festively dressed girls with garlands of flowers in their hair, lifting their skirts, dancing barefoot in meadows and gardens. They were full of the confidence of youth, with cheeks blushing, and the excitement of spring. A sensual flirtation with all of creation and the scent of desire were in the air. Then a message came into my being.
When I heard bleeding heart’s message, I knew that keeping safe and silent would no longer be an option for me. They said, “Let your passion and exuberance overcome your fears of sharing your heart. Your very life force will protect you from giving away your essence. It is time to dance. Pull up your skirts and show the world your passion! Be full of courage!”
Deep in my heart, I knew these images and messages had come to me from the bleeding-heart flowers, not just my imagination, and an aliveness opened inside me that brought me some of the deepest joy I have ever known. Yet I wasn’t sure what to make of them, nor how to act on them, or even how to talk about them to anyone.
Learning to trust the flower’s messages has been a long process of unraveling enculturated beliefs and learning to trust my own heart. While I know now the flowers have been calling to me all my life, it was only about five years ago that I began to trust my intuition enough to allow myself to hear and trust the messages that were coming to me from the flowers—and bleeding heart was one of the first ones I heard.
The understanding that I can communicate with the flowers intuitively has grown so subtly in my life that it is impossible to name a starting point. It has been an ache, a longing, and an occasional flash of inspiration all through my life. I know now this awareness began in my childhood, then was buried for many decades.
For me, listening to the flowers is a reciprocal process. The flower chooses me first, like an invitation. A mutual magnetism is present—an interest, a noticing—not unlike an attraction to another person. And then we begin to play. I observe everything I can about them and take in their essence. I photograph them. I sit with them and allow my feelings, memories, and emotions to be stimulated by them. I read about them—history, lore, growth habits and traits. Then I sit down to free-write—to just put whatever words come to me—with all these feelings and experiences of the flower swirling in and around my heart and mind. Most importantly, I ask what the flower wants to teach me. Asking opens a door between realms. Messages will come through that I know are more than my own reflections. Sometimes this process happens in a single day, sometimes it takes weeks. It can be a direct message, and sometimes it is just more of a general knowing.
I think of it as just listening, with that creative, intuitive part of my being—something we all have the capacity to do. My rational linear brain is a great servant, but a poor master—my heart leads the way when I am listening to the flowers. For our ancient ancestors, listening to the flowers was a matter of kinship and survival as natural as observing and listening to the phases of the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the voices of their human kin.
Each type of flower has a distinctive voice—a unique aspect of the “Animate Everything”—as Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand, refers to our sacred world. Flowers speak with a wisdom gained through living on this planet for eons longer than we have and learning to adapt to an ever-changing world. Our non-human companions on this planet—both animals and plants—have intelligence and ways of communicating that are vastly different than our human ways of interacting. Once we began to believe we were more intelligent than these other beings we inhabit our planet with, we largely lost our ability to communicate with them.
When I first started sitting with flowers and writing their messages, my cultural conditioning made me feel overwhelmed and told me that I might be “crazy.” It took a few years to deeply trust the flowers’ messages in a process of prayer and listening, distillation and discernment; and to trust that I would not be ostracized, as perhaps my mother and grandmothers likely would have been. Their ancestors would have faced even worse. For surely, talking with plants was one way to be called a witch during those fear-fueled centuries of suppressing the old knowledge, the non-rational knowledge, the women’s wisdom.
Once, I traveled to a country where the language and the alphabet were completely incomprehensible to me, and yet, with a lot of extra effort and observation, I somehow found ways of making my needs known and was able to interact a little. Communicating with plants is a bit like that. Setting aside our human centric understanding of intelligence and ways of communicating is essential. Science is only beginning to understand how plants can smell, see, hear, taste and touch in vastly different ways than we do, even without brains. With many more eons of experience than we have of living in this changing world, there is so much to learn from them. What I hear most is that they love us deeply and want to help us, as they always have.
When I connect with a flower’s wisdom, I feel incredibly alive—on fire with the very life force of the world flowing through me—a life force literally full of desire. It can be quite erotic even, this desire to be connected to nature, to a flower—to feel the embodied sensuality that this deep longing awakens in me.
The flowers let me know I don’t have to limit my joy. No matter what else is happening in the world, I can still experience unlimited joy, wherever I find it. It is like a resurrection, a realization that joy is our inheritance and something we are worthy of.
I used to run from these experiences because I didn’t understand where the powerful life force came from or what to do with it, and to be honest, I didn’t feel worthy of receiving it. At one time I was so separated from my feelings, silenced by generations of buried emotions, that I didn’t know how to trust this passion for the flowers and all of nature that was bubbling up in me. But now I know it is my birthright. We are all part of this body of the Earth, this ecosystem we call Nature, longing to be reconnected and called home.
With their unrestrained passion bursting out of their roots at the first sign of spring, the bleeding heart flowers let me know it was time to bring forth what I held beneath the surface deep in my own roots. My winter season had simply lasted longer than it should have—it was time for me to break loose from the cultural and self-imposed boundaries around my heart.
I remember my first bleeding heart blossoms in my Colorado garden. I was impressed with how quickly they manifested such volume and detail. A miracle in my mind. Thanks for the memory ✨💫💕
and how wonderful that you opened into your gifts and now share them with us! bleeding hearts is a kin that always brings me so much joy and gentle excitement. I love how you shared their medicine, and the message really landed for me as the spring slowly awakens and my energy longs to move out into the world again. xoxo