Photo title: “The Kiss”.

Healthy, mature blooms gather around a new bud who holds the promise of next year’s flower.

One flower tenderly kisses the base of the new bud, affirming that they have everything they need, already inside them, to be their fullest self; in and for the beauty of the world.

Like wise (grand)mothers who see the young ones’ potential and guide them to their soul purpose.

This is the role of elders, to know themselves and to companion young ones on their life path.

I see images everywhere in wider Nature; faces, shapes, metaphoric impressions conveyed in stones, trees, plants… Such metaphoric impressions are simply what draw my attention. They offer comfort, ease and endless wonderment. They add life to life. I use to keep these conveyances to myself, as this way of seeing is foreign in Western society. But now I share them freely as the gift that they are; a healing balm in a world awash with grief.

What is rising in the world right now are questions for the soul, rather than answers prescribed by egoic assumptions of a patriarchal worldview. Where do we source these deeper questions, to heal the broken relationship between humans and wider Nature, if not in Nature herself?

I circle back to the purity of my childhood roots, communing with the animals and trees of Stanley Park – gathering them up now with the life experience of elderhood, and teetering with all kin at the edge of Earth’s crumbling life support systems.

To perceive the impression of a mature flower tenderly encouraging the potential of a young bud is a relational capacity that is uniquely human; receptive, generative and life-affirming.

This story is an honouring of that good-human capacity to witness the world in a relational way.

We discover (or remember) our innate place, our true home, our soul’s purpose, when the world mirrors it to us by way of nature-based metaphors, human archetypes, or other mythic or poetic images or symbols. We do not choose these metaphors or figure them out. Rather, we are shown them in a moment of numinous vision or mystical revelation.

~~ Bill Plotkin ~~