Doing the Work of Flowering

Many cultures refer to May's full moon as the flower moon thanks to the abundant blooming that occurs as spring gets going properly. Today is May 16. It’s the 5th Full Moon of 2022. And thanks to last nights beautiful eclipse, this moon is known as the Super Flower Blood Moon!

Whew! Sounds about right for today.

Why Do Plants Make Flowers

Flowers are very expensive, metabolically speaking. The biological cost of creating flower tissues, colors, scents, and sexual organs - replete with nectars to feed the pollinators is very high.

So why do plants work so hard to make them?

The answer to the why of flowers is, of course that without flowers - our ecological system would simply not survive.

If you've never sat down before, and reflected on the complexity of code embedded in each little seed of a flowering plant, I'd invite you to try it. Talk about iterative design and continuous progression testing!

We Are All Tied Into The One Great Cycle

• Seeds come from the completion of the sexual cycle of plants.
• Seeds connect with a complex web of life in the soil and combine their codes with raw materials sourced from the network in the soil to grow more plants.
• These plants make flowers. The building blocks of flowers are complex. There are sugars to form plant tissues, flavanoids for color, terpenes for scent and pheromones, fats sugars, and amino acids to make nectar and pollen. And these all come out of the ground!
• Pollinators feed from the flowers, symbiotically pollinating the plants as they go.
• Fertilized flowers make the fruits that feed the animals, including humans.
• And seeds make their way through the system like little stealth black box packets of encrypted information to which only the mysterious life force that animates all things holds the key to decrypt and use.

Pretty mind-blowing when you think about it.

So Flowers Grow so Life Can Go, But...

The gathering of resources to create the beautiful and functional sexual organs of planthood requires quite an effort! But when you realize seeds don't have to do it all on their own, because plant sex is a team effort, things get a little more reasonable.

Life emerges from a combination of genetic instructions, material elements, and a perception of the proper circumstances to allow that seed of life to have a good shot at thriving. It's the intersection of all these things that allows for life, or spirit if you will, to animate the matter we think of as a plant.

Who Helps the Seed Create the Flower?

A seed is going nowhere on its own. No matter how vital seeds are to the continuation of plant life, it is just one part of many. Put the building blocks of life together without the spark of divine source, and you just end up with a pile of building blocks. Not life.

A seed can sit on a shelf for hundreds of years without germinating until the conditions for life are correct. The 2000 year old date palm seed found in the ruins of a desert fortress was the oldest on record to be germinated. Talk about shelf life!

That seed needs help from all of the following things to transform and grow:

• Network - the mycorrhizal network (an underground system of fungal hyphae) is the internet of the soil. It establishes connections with plant roots to transport water, nutrients, and minerals to the plants at the right time, and per the plants requests.
• Soil - nutrient rich and complex in nature, soil is far more than just dirt. It's the base culture that provides plants with the access to the many complex nutrients they need to build beautiful flowers as well as the rest of the above-ground plant body. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, and trace minerals - these are all kept in the storehouse of the soil. They're either waiting to be transported to plants as needed, or being deposited in the soil from the plants.
• Pollinators - Bees have just been declared the most important living thing on earth. The Science Times reports that 70% of the world's agriculture is dependent on pollination that happens exclusively by bees. If plants didn't have a partnership with the bees (and other pollinators) there would be no need to create flowers in the first place.
• Elements - Earth, fire, water, and air. These four elements are celebrated and honored as key drivers in the life-development cycle we call plant growth. Think of them as the engine that drives the process that supports plants (and animals) in their journey through being alive.
• Cycles - Spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Unless you're living down in SoCal where just about every day is 72 and sunny, the seasons are an important part of the lifecycle of all living beings. Different conditions cause different reactions and adaptations. This fluctuation in the environment contributes to the slow up and down that is the vibration of life.
• Time - also known as patience, this is the element of plant development that takes the most trust. When a seed is placed into the soil, time must be given for the seed case to split, and the sprout to make it's way up to the sun. For an amazing visual of this, click this beautiful thing, accompanied by the wise feminine wisdom of Maya Luna.

What Lessons Can We Learn From the Flowers?

Life is complex and interrelated. There are no simple answers on how to best protect and preserve life. We can try, ad nauseum, to control how it goes. But we won't really ever succeed because control is an illusion.

Maybe it'd be better if we focused on enjoying where we are at right now?

Life is also expensive! Not money expensive, but needful of resources, effort, and striving at some points in the cycle. Sometimes you get your resources together and work to put that new release, or new bloom, out into the world. Sometimes it's time to mix and mingle and pollinate ideas and information. Sometimes it's time to turn inward and focus on things the rest of the world can't see.

The master budget to manage all these phases of being needs to be on point to make sure resources are allocated properly and the overarching plan is prioritized over each individual step.

Finally, life is a process. Sometimes you will be blooming. Sometimes you won't. Your current state of external appearance really has very little to do with your inherent worth. Which, in my mind, is worth remembering.

If you've made it this far, thanks for taking a moment out of your busy day to consider the lessons of the flower. It connects more to the world of business and commerce more than I think most of us like to admit!

Here's Your Question

Are you happy with your own ability to flower? And if not, what resources or help can you recruit to help you get to where you want to be?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to read them.

Newsletter image by Noémi Macavei-Katócz on Unsplash