The Journey of the Wildflower, Episode 33
In this conversation Lizzie and Justin talk about how attempts to turn away from the dark usually have the effect of turning us away from our own aliveness. We consider how we might start to see the unknowability of life as part of life's essential condition, and how telling the truth about our own experience is a path towards embracing what we can't change and flourishing in the midst of it.
Along the way we start to see how in the end, we can never really turn away from life - because we are, all of us, expressions of life - and how it's our misunderstandings around this that cause us so much difficulty.
The Journey of the Wildflower
This morning I was stopped in my tracks
By the simple, exquisite beauty
Of a violet-petalled flower who had
Burst her way into bloom
Out of a crack in a concrete wall.
I wondered why I was so moved by her –
Why I felt such deep and instant friendship,
And I realised that she was beaming me
With the truth that
All growth starts in darkness.
That all beginnings are seemingly hopeless –
That it is impossible to imagine
The violet of a future petal
When all you know is the darkness
And hardness of the unknown.
And that this is how it is for us
When we are asked repeatedly by life
To turn towards the pain,
The sacredness,
The beauty,
The grief,
The constant endings
As well as the constant beginnings,
Without knowing how or why
Or even if we can bear any of it at all.
But here she was,
Blooming at me,
Telling me with every cell
To keep turning towards
The fire of the Sun.
To keep risking it,
To keep my petals open,
To know beyond the hardness of the concrete
Who I really am.
Sometimes it happens like this, you see;
A wildflower invites me all the way home
And I follow her.