Blooming into Presence: How a Single Flower Fed Me
There is power in something as simple as our awareness.
At the weekend I did a group walk around Hayling Island, a piece of land shaped like a gummy bear off the bottom of England. It’s a place that’s home to rows upon rows of salty oyster bed lagoons that sit at the foot of the sea, protected by soil walls, sewn with white and pink flowers that create a lacy fringe as you look out to a rough, seal-grey Atlantic.
It was here, on this walk through a nature reserve, that I realised that a simple flower could feed me. By this, I don’t mean that we all stopped off at a pub at the end of the walk and braved the Dandelion soup, but that I was shown that if I dropped into the present moment and brought my full awareness to a single flower along the path, it could, for a moment, render me whole.
I should say that I sometimes feel I experience life behind a pane of glass, meaning that as I move through the world, I don’t allow much of it to penetrate me. I see and hear things, I taste, touch and smell them, but I can’t say how much is really allowed in, how much is digested, metabolised, and re-experienced as fuel and sustenance.
Another word for this may be disconnection or disassociation, a state that is protective in nature and usually, activated in childhood. In my case, this withdrawal from the world could stem from a repressed anger toward it. Certainly, any little eight-year-old girl, as I once was, who is unable to stop comforting herself with food and watches as her stomach and face grow squishy and bloated will feel an utter heart-flattening sense of shame and frustration, and a need to buffer herself from reality. Another theory is this distancing is out of a fear that if I never give anything my full attention it doesn’t exist enough to hurt me, a strategy that splits you from the bad as well as the good.
However, on Saturday, as I marched along, trying, as usual, to work out if I was actually enjoying myself and wondering when we might stop for lunch so that I could sink my teeth into the soft egg and tomato bloomer I’d been having invasive thoughts about since we started, my eyes scanned over a lone yellow dandelion and stopped.
There was nothing special about this dandelion, there was no reason not to just pass it by and skim over the next piece of ground beneath me, but something whispered, ‘to stop and look at it, really look it.’ And I did as I was divinely instructed, and in that moment I felt myself and the world expand.
What I saw was not my idea of a dandelion, but this dandelion. I beheld its fuzzy yellow head with its uneven burst of tatty, fraying petals atop a cluster of thistly green leaves, carved out like some ornate Emperor’s sword. I allowed the essence of this unassuming weed to alchemise with my own and acknowledged that we were both here on the planet at the same time and place, and for a moment I felt connected and sane.
My attention then wandered to a patch of shimmering, paper-thin grass fluttering in the whip of the harsh sea breeze. As I became absorbed in its rhythm my mind forgot what it had been trying to fix, my breathing deepened and slowed and I accessed a delicious peace. Perhaps most extraordinarily of all, I no longer ached for a mouthful of egg salad sandwich!
Food, both the eating and the anticipation of it has always been a way I have tried to fill the emptiness within. Cigarettes and alcohol have also been employed. Although, these are all quick ways to damn the ‘hole in the soul’, they only last for as long as they’re ingested and have consequences. On this walk, I was gifted the message that I could perhaps fill up by being truly present to what is around me and in touch with my senses.
For most of us though that experienced pain as a child or grew up in situations that felt either yucky or truly intolerable, as there was no choice but to stay for our survival, the only choice we did have, the one thing we were in control of was our attention and so we took it back. In some cases that meant escaping inward and building beautiful castles out of our thoughts and fantasies, physical places and mental spaces we believed we would someday live. In other cases, it might have meant vacating one’s body regularly. This could have been the result of abuse, but it could also be from something as benevolent as being strapped down into a pushchair as your anxious Mum waits for the bus on a busy road. Your body, in that moment, desperate to be freed, uses the inch of slack it has to hurl your tiny shoulders back and forth against the straps, before eventually giving in and opting out.
However, it is that I ended up fragmenting, it’s this fear of presence and of really ‘being there’ that is responsible for the emptiness I need substances and outside distractions to fix. If I’m brave enough to get still, the medicine, it would seem, lies within.
That is why today, on another walk, this time along a long, stony beach I choose to actively pour my attention into the world around me. I watch as the bruisy sea rakes its foamy spit through the pebbles underneath my feet and later, after we finally stop for lunch (yay!), I stare into the dark canopy of the tree above with its black weathered branches and notice the chubby squirrel resting in a hollowed-out crevice. It’s a place that I too choose to rest my attention for a while as I share myself with the world and allow it to share itself with me.
