You Can Rip Out the Plant. But Life Keeps Blooming.
Updated: Oct 1
Last week, a friend and I were walking one of our favourite tracks.
It's in suburbia, but you'd hardly know it. The path winds through beautiful natural forest, lush and green and just wild enough to make you forget there are houses backing onto it.
And spilling out from one of those gardens, over the rocks and onto the path, was the most glorious mass of nasturtiums.
Completely unruly.
Red and orange flowers everywhere.
We stopped to admire them, picked a couple and commented on how ridiculously gorgeous they were.
Nothing profound.
Just one of those small moments when something beautiful catches you by the sleeve and says:
Look.
A week later we walked the same track.
The nasturtiums were gone.
Someone had ripped the whole magnificent tangle out and thrown it into the bush.
Honestly, we were shocked.
There it was—this luscious, generous, slightly wild explosion of life—discarded amongst the dead leaves and garden debris as rubbish.
But then we looked more closely.
And there they were.
The flowers were still blooming.
Bright red and orange heads pushing their way through the dying tangle.
Still outrageous.
Still beautiful.
Still being nasturtiums. 😄
There was something almost defiant about them.
As though nobody had bothered to tell them they'd been thrown away.
So of course we picked some.
I brought the flowers home for my altar and took a little cutting with me.
Partly because I wanted to remember what we'd seen.
And partly because it felt like Mother Nature had just delivered one of her rather excellent teachings without being asked.
Life wants to live.
We can cut it back.
Ignore it.
Control it.
Rip it out because it's growing somewhere we hadn't planned.
We can even forget our own beauty, strength, joy and power.
And still...
something keeps breathing through us.
Something keeps reaching for the light.
Something sends out another green leaf.
Another flower.
Another possibility.
This is what the Divine Feminine means to me.
Not simply an idea about women.
Not something decorative, delicate or even particularly well behaved.
It is a principle of life itself.
The mysterious intelligence that grows a forest.
Pushes a shoot through concrete.
Heals a wound.
Creates a baby.
Tells the heart to keep beating while we're asleep.
And somehow produces a blazing orange flower from a discarded heap of dying vines.
Call it Nature.
Call it Shakti.
Call it Goddess.
I don't mind terribly much.
I just don't think we're separate from it.
That same life force moves through us.
Even when we've forgotten it.
Even when we've become terribly sensible.
Even when we've denied our beauty or silenced our instincts or made ourselves smaller because that seemed easier for everybody concerned.
Still she blooms.
And perhaps this is why Navaratri continues to move me.
For a little while each year, we deliberately remember.
We turn towards nine different faces of that one magnificent, uncompromising, intelligent, steady, devoted, courageous force we call Durga Maa.
Not because she suddenly arrives when the festival begins.
She's been here all along.
We are simply paying attention again.
And that little cutting I brought home?
A week later, it is still flourishing.
One rather improbable stem.
A few tender green leaves.
And a brilliant orange flower opening itself to the world as though nothing whatsoever has happened.
Fragile.
Strong.
Completely itself.
And still, relentlessly, sharing its glory.
There's a lesson in that. 🌺
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