Nope! Not a bottle.
A plant!
Once upon a time… yesterday, to be exact, I set out on a journey. I took along two paintings. The one you see above, and this one:
I took paper and markers and and books.
I took a head full of plans. You see, I was leading a workshop in Intentional Creativity®
This seemed like a familiar journey. I was ready!
An odd thing happened along the the way…
I arrived – about 3 miles from my house – in a new world!
Okay, it wasn’t the first time I’d been there. It was just the first time I’d been one of the team!
This world was inhabited by dear people who speak languages I’m only beginning to grasp.
The language of anthroposophic medicine and the language of Waldorf education.
Each of them takes in to account, in their own contexts, whole human beings!
There’s more, if you look it up, not all complimentary, but that can be said of basically everything that doesn’t fit the boxes in our brains!
We sang.
We moved. Well, each in our own ways.
We did some right/left brain processing using the beginnings of a painting process known as Insight.
But, just before that, we looked at plants.
Now, allowing for the fact that this was a whole new adventure for me, filled with ways of noticing and wondering I had not encountered before, I’ll give you the bits that I brought home.
First, this method of observing plants comes from the work of Goethe – yep! that one! – who was, in addition to being a poet and philosopher, quite the student of botany, anatomy, and color.
This involved, as you might imagine, a trip outside!
It involved lots of looking. A bit of touching for those able to get close enough to the plants. And, after lots of looking, it involved some describing and drawing.
And yes, that’s Visual – Auditory/Digital – and Kinesthetic processing!
The thing that struck me most about this adventure into previously unknown world views was the message which came to me.
But first, a bit of imagining, if you would.
A tiny, gravel-y patch of dirt between two urban concrete parking lots. Quite a colony of plants you might consider to be weeds if you were raised in the land of suburban lawns.
(Here we’re going to depart from Goethe’s process just a bit and allow for some nouns in our description because you haven’t seen the specific plants from our adventure and deserve a bit of extra help!)
Large rosettes of moist, rounded, leathery green leaves, close to the ground. Thin, spiky, stem-ish bits reaching for the sky. Seed heads at the top of most. Loosely dandelion-like, but considerably smaller.
Oh… and the message I heard!
Delicate, vulnerable hope blown by the wind of the Spirit.
If you’ve known me for a bit, you’ve already realized that there are virtual context brackets around that message!
Mass shootings. January 6th attempted coup hearings. The war in Ukraine. Huge, intentional threats to civil rights… in the USA.
Delicate, vulnerable hope blown by the wind of the Spirit.
And people like you and me, rooted not in a lush, orderly garden, but right in the midst of this world, with the opportunity to be hope.
I’m in! Are you???
ps… need a bit of help finding or navigating your path? Your Epic SuperPower Path Survey
pps… the plant? Plantains. “Weeds” to many of us, which grow in my garden close to the dandelions (aka vegetables!) Being their part of a delicate eco-system which supports all life. I’m just sayin’!
What a great opportunity. Spiritually we are starving as humans. Women seem too carry it more in them than men.
Thank you, dear Jean, for reading AND hearing! It was a great opportunity… the kind where the guides were learning, too! May we all help each other to be fed!