Under the Imaginative Mayapple

Where we remember who we have been and who we want to be

With deep winter blowing into most of the northern hemisphere, what better time to explore your imagination?

Mayapples popping up through the leaf litter on the forest floor early each spring has always meant spring is here for me. They rise quickly from the dirt rather like a mushroom at first, and then open their ten-to-fifteen-inch bright green leaves like an umbrella, hovering about a foot off the ground. They grow in community, connected by their rhizome roots, making a large low-lying, shiny green canopy, long before the tall trees above them leaf out. Their shy flower hides under their leafy umbrella, protected, inviting us to peer into the miniature worlds made possible in their shade. Mayapple protects their leaves and roots from predators by making them poisonous, but the two-to-five-centimeter apple-like fruit that forms from their single flower is edible when ripe and pleasant tasting, especially to turtles.

Their spectacularly shiny green leaves have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Something about them instinctually makes me bend down and peer under them, looking for the worlds of my favorite childhood books, especially the ones with fairies.

My childhood self was always much more comfortable living in other people’s imaginations than my own. Beatrix Potter, James Matthew Berry, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, JR Tolkien, and Mary Stewart were some of the authors whose books I devoured and imagined myself inside their stories. I used to think I just didn’t have much imagination myself, but I wonder now how much I had taken in messages to only trust what was “real?” With a strong desire to “fit in” and be a good girl, I took my mother’s lead to be practical and logical like she was. Interestingly, my dad was more imaginative, and daydreamed with me as a child, but in my teen years, it was my mother who encouraged me to be creative, while my father had become concerned that I learn to support myself. Thankfully, the books, the flowers and the forest never stopped inviting me into their worlds.

When we begin to tell our children, and our elders with dementia, what is real and what isn’t—what realms, what ways of being, feeling and understanding are we denying? By stifling their imagination, are we also suppressing their feelings, their creativity and even their heart’s desires? It is not just our professional artists, writers, and musicians who are creative. We are all creative. We are all imaginative. We all have deep feelings. It is our birthright to follow our heart’s desire. In fact, it’s imperative that we do.

The mayapples and dandelions—and the myriads of houseplants I talked my mom into buying when I was nine and ten—were already calling me into other worlds. With them I felt free to bypass the expectations, the shoulds, the need for acceptance, and fear of being mocked, that were so stifling to my imagination, intuition, and creativity, although I couldn’t articulate that then. I only knew that when I was with my plant friends, I could allow my imagination to wander.

Mayapple says to me: “I am here to help you cultivate a haven outside of time where your imagination can become real again. Step into the forgotten sanctuary of your daydreams underneath the umbrella canopy of my leaves and enter your childhood worlds of small people, fairies, and all that you imagined, where you can remember who you have been and who you want to be.”

Flowers have taught me to trust my imagination again. When I began to hear their messages, I dismissed them at first. Then for a while, I feared them, because they felt so much bigger than me. What would be asked of me if I accepted them and trusted them? I wondered many times if I was just making them up. Then one day someone asked me to consider, what if it didn’t matter whether I was making them up or not? What if my imagination was real, simply another part of the realms we inhabit? And suddenly, the doubt my mind kept holding over me no longer mattered. The line between imagination and “the real world” began to blur and co-exist. I could allow both. I had permission to trust my heart. It was like a light switch. “Just my imagination” was no longer a part of myself I dismissed.

I have come to trust the nudges, the ideas, the flowers, the memories, the people, that pop into my mind unexpectedly as messages I need to follow, as guidance from my intuition, my beloved dead, my muse, the divine, the universe, my heart—really by whatever name works for me at the time. I trust them more than my own logical thought processes much of the time, especially when the way ahead is unclear, because I feel they are coming from more expansive, interdimensional worlds than my logical mind is capable of.

When I have an idea, a nudge, or an image that arises, sometimes I sense that a connection with a flower, or another being, has stimulated the image or memory in my mind and I consider this a form of communication between us. Seeing signs in nature that trigger a memory or meaning is a similar process. What happens when we allow these ideas and synchronicities to develop instead of dismissing them as random thoughts? Our imagination and our intuition are intricately connected. When I allow my intuition to use my imagination as a messenger, the vastly different language of the flowers begins to open to me.

The flowers speak slowly, though. So very slowly. It may take days or weeks or longer to begin to know why they have caught our attention, why they keep niggling into us with an idea we can’t quite grasp yet. Our imagination and intuition are crucial tools for expanding our field of understanding outside our normal human-centric view.

Before I would allow myself to accept what the flowers were sharing with me—to trust my intuition and imagination—I had to face a lot of my fears. I was afraid of being dismissed as crazy, illogical, not practical, or even of being called a witch. The human need for acceptance, to not be ostracized and thrown out of the village, is so innate and strong. Any suggestion that our flowers and plants and our planet themselves are sentient has been laughed at for several centuries now, especially in the modern world of science. Tragically, this prejudice immediately shuts down our imagination and intuition, and cuts us off from the interactions and wisdom of other species that our ancestors experienced for millennia.

Intuition is a muscle—and so is our imagination. They both take practice to begin to trust them and use them. And we must ask for what we want, to open ourselves to the possibilities. Learning to trust the uncertainty of our intuition is counter to everything we are taught in school—where we are taught to trust facts provided by others, rather than to learn to trust our hearts and our intuition.

Einstein said, "Imagination is greater than knowledge. Knowledge is limited and imagination encompasses the cosmos."

Mayapple invites me to peek under their umbrellas, even if only in my mind’s eye, and imagine what is happening there—to step into the space where I can allow anything to happen, anyone to speak to me. There are no “shoulds” under the mayapple. Only the excitement of infinite possibilities. And if I can allow my imagination to have infinite possibilities, I can also allow my heart to desire what it truly desires.

It will take all our collective imaginations to change how our culture perceives the world that sustains us. Our imagination is our strength, a gift we are given to create new maps to lead us forward. Come gather under the mayapples to play, to imagine, to create, to intuit, to discover new patterns of being. If I can imagine my life differently than how it is now, might I be more likely to recognize the opportunities to create that new way of being when they arise? Might I be more likely to believe that I deserve them, that they are possible, that I can step into a promise or a solution that arises? My imagination allows me to hear the world around me answering my heart’s desires.

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