If you are drawn to read this then it’s probable that you are already familiar with the perils of pollen, the aggravations of allergy. Enough about that. But as you reckon with pollen this season — while coronavirus drifts ominously across the land — you may find it strengthening to reflect on the promise pollen signals as an agent of the flowers.
When I was writing Legend of the Rainbow Warriors decades ago, I gained some uncommon insights into the many-petaled mysteries of flowers. My senses were roused through color, form, fragrance, and essence
That book included a chapter titled Blossoms in an Age of Flowers, and that chapter included an interview with Cherokee and Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Ven. Khandro Dhyani Ywahoo of Vermont.
Dhyani shared with me her observation that many people are out of alignment with the Earth. This is in part a result of the long-term drugging of our farms and our food. For decades we’ve been using artificial fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and preservatives, meanwhile gobbling jars of artificial vitamins.
Because the plants are jazzed up, so also are the farm animals who eat the plants in their closely confined industrial quarters, and who then become meat for human beings. It’s an overall chemically jazzed-up diet for most people.
Having ingested great gobs of artificiality over years, our bodily systems may become unbalanced and consequently respond to natural substances as antagonists.
Yet the very flowers that release the rhythmic cascades of pollen, also offer us insight into personal and planetary well-being. Flowers are a way to bring spirit light into our lives. In releasing pollen as a messenger they attract the attention of human beings, albeit in uncomfortable ways. Acting as a quickening agent, the pollen demands our attention and response. We must strive to put ourselves, and our world, back into balance.
In my experience, chemical drugs are not the way to restore balance to human bodies, or to farm fields.
As Dhyani explained to me during our interviews, “flowers give light and joy. They also have a very subtle consciousness. They have a unity of mind. Flower energy is peaceful, and flowers are great medicine.
“Flowers move with the sun; thus they have a certain committed solar consciousness, They know the proper relationship between spirit and earth. The flowers remind us to look up to heaven and to actualize the solar energy in our own lives — to speak more clearly and to act more clearly.
On the level of fundamental appreciation for the floral possibilities signaled by pollen, The Flower Essence Society teaches that flower essences address health in a broad sense. They strengthen the links between body and soul.
Flowers are the highest, most beautiful, and most refined part of plants. They can help awaken and develop the highest, most beautiful, and most refined parts of ourselves.
In our time of coronavirus, as we all contend with the pandemic swirling through our lives, it strikes me that many people could benefit from engaging the essence of one flower in particular, borage. Borage can help lift feelings of heavy heartedness, encourage the quality of courage, and generally add a note of buoyancy to the soul.
Independent journalist Steven McFadden is rooted in cyberspace atDeepAgroecology.net. Information about his wider work and all of his nonfiction books is available atChiron-Communications.com. You can read all of Steven’s Mother Earth News blog postshere.
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