What is Joy, for a Flower?

Amidst everything, the flowers offer us a lifeline

Even if we don’t experience it often, we all know the spontaneous laughter that comes so freely that we can’t help throwing our head back as a feeling of joy flows up from our belly and delight pours out of our upturned throat. That is the joy that each flower shares with the world every time they bloom. For a flower, joy is nothing more, and nothing less, than the celebration of the very life force of the Earth, the love that flows through everything. In a culture that prefers conformity and productivity, embodying this joy is a radical act that the flowers invite us to engage in with them each time they bloom.

One summer on a mountain hike, I experienced the unstoppable joy of a whole mountain of wild rhododendrons during a super-bloom—an extraordinarily profuse bloom that only happens every few years. As I turned a corner on the winding trail, I was suddenly surrounded by an explosion of white blossoms on fifteen-foot-high bushes and the air around me became incredibly quiet and soft. I felt transported and floating—lifted by thousands of cotton ball-like hands, each made up of twenty or more flowers, opening to show lime green speckles at their center. Fallen petals lining the path were like a trail left by fairies. I stood transfixed, with my mouth open in wonder, as a feeling of primordial joy washed over me.

The mysteries of what called forth this exuberant bloom tugged at my heart. What abundance were they celebrating? In their unmistakable jubilation, there was a timeless chorus of joy and devotion, which became a deep keening as well, as the lines between joy and sorrow disappeared into the vast eons of generations of rhododendrons that have danced on these oldest of mountains. When rhododendrons suddenly surround us with a soft explosion of their blooms, there is no choice but to dance with them, letting them sweep us off our feet as a feeling of glory overwhelms us. Floating with them in the breeze, I felt time lengthening out into eternity over the millions of years this annual celebration has occurred.

My heart was bursting as I heard them say, “We are the ancient voice of these oldest of mountains. The stone itself sings their songs of joy and celebration through our flowers each year at mid-summer, and that song is Beauty. Come sing with us as we celebrate the joys of all the beings and lifetimes of the Earth.”

The flowers have taught me that joy is not a singular experience. When we embody joy, it ripples out to others and becomes contagious. It weaves in and amongst our pains and our sorrows, strengthening the fabric of our lives. Joy is one of our primary warp threads, the strong chords that hold the fabric together; while all the things we worry about and those that bring us sorrow and grief, are simply part of the weft, the daily events weaving back-and-forth through our lives. Author Brené Brown has a wonderful quote about joy. She says, “The good news is that joy, collected over time, fuels resilience—ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.”

The flowers—as a collective group—are telling us that cultivating everyday joy is more important than ever in these times. When our lives are chaotic, unpredictable, stressful or hurtful, it is important to allow moments of joy, beauty and wonder—looking for them every time we remember to take a moment and breathe in deeply.

The level of joy I experienced on that mountain top with the rhododendrons was a special celebration that let me know how boundless our joy can be when we remove the limitations that we place on ourselves. But everyday joys are what build the strong fabric of our lives. The dandelion showing up through the crack in the driveway, the crocus popping up through the snow, the laughter with family and friends; these are the everyday joys that remind us to keep our hearts open to new life that is always returning.

So many things conspire though, to keep us from our joy, or tell us our joy has to wait. In our merit-based society, the idea that we have to earn our joy is rampant, leaving us feeling unworthy of having it. Another misconception is if we allow ourselves to feel a lot of joy, then we are inviting more pain into our lives in equal measures. We wonder “when the other shoe is going to drop.” For others who are grieving, guilt can arise if they allow too much joy. Sometimes joy asks us to open our hearts when we don’t feel safe. In response, we often create a limit, a joy ceiling in our hearts, because we are afraid to open ourselves to unbounded joy.

The biggest fallacy happens when we tell ourselves that we can’t feel joy at the same time we are sad, angry, distressed, grieving or any other emotion. We have such a strong tendency to only allow one feeling at a time in our culture that divides so much into this or that, black or white, good or bad. But the flowers and all of nature continually show us that a diverse both/and approach to life is the natural way of the world. Flowers are constantly blooming amidst the most devastating disasters, changing landscapes and creating new ecosystems. Joy is necessary to the composting of our grief, as I talked about in a recent post, The Disappearing Ones. Our emotions are a garden, a multiplicity of lives feeding each other, growing and dying and being reborn together. To allow ourselves to fully take in the joy that the flowers are offering never negates our suffering, or the suffering of those around us.

As Emily Dickinson said in her poem, Bloom, “To be a flower is an awesome responsibility.”

Finding our joy is how we will find our way forward in a changing chaotic world. When we open our hearts to joy, we see the world through a much wider lens, opening doorways we couldn’t imagine otherwise. Cultivating joy is a radical act, and it is our birthright. And the flowers are here, with their eons of ancient earth wisdom to show us how to claim it.

How then, do we actually connect with the flowers and cultivate our joy? Recovering the reverence and devotion to flowers and all the natural world that our ancestors once had is how we can shift our lives and our world into balance once again. The good news is that this is something everyone can do.

Starting April 15^th, I am offering a five-week workshop Guidance from the Flowers: Cultivating Everyday Joy, where we will explore our entwined evolutionary love story with the flowers, learn about their radical intelligence so different from our own, and empower ourselves to use our intuition and imagination to hear their messages. You can learn more about the workshop HERE on my website. I hope you consider joining the conversation with me!