There is something I have been thinking about flowers that I want to try to put into words.
Flowers show up every year at the same time.
Not approximately. Not when the conditions are perfect. Reliably, faithfully, and in the same spots, often through conditions that should have stopped them. The bee balm at the edge of the woods. The tulips by the front window. The rudbeckia against the fence that comes back every summer without being asked.
They do not need you to remember them. They just come back.
I have started to think of them as presences. Not metaphorically, not as decoration, and not as symbols of something else. As beings with their own energy and their own intention, showing up with a consistency and warmth that deserves recognition.
Old friends who know the way.
How Flowers Entered My Practice
My relationship to nature as a spiritual practice started with the butterfly manifestation.
Three years ago I set an intention: I am the kind of person who finds dead butterflies and feathers everywhere I go. That summer I found everything I needed to fill a shadow box. The butterflies, the feathers, the wings, and the found objects. I have been a believer in signs from the natural world ever since.
The marbles came later. A prayer on a Tuesday in February and then marbles appearing everywhere for weeks.
The pattern I kept noticing was that nature responds. Not in the way a text message responds. More like the way a garden responds. Slowly, quietly, and with its own timing. But genuinely.
Flowers were always part of the studio. Cut from the garden, brought in from somewhere, and always present in the space. But I started paying attention to them differently after that. Started noticing not just their beauty but their character. The way certain flowers feel like they are trying to tell you something. The way the garden has its own rhythm that does not care about your schedule.
Two Threads Coming Together in the New Work
The new watercolor series I have been working on follows two separate threads that feel deeply related even though they are distinct.
The first is energy. Specifically the way energy enters a chakra. Not as a static color or a symbol but as something that moves, something with direction and quality and feeling. What does it actually look like when the heart chakra opens to receive something? What is the visual quality of energy moving through the throat when it begins to clear? These are the questions the chakra watercolors are trying to answer through image rather than description.
The second thread is flowers. What happens when you sit with a specific flower in meditation and try to sense its energy? Not what the flower symbolizes in some traditional system. What it actually feels like to be in the presence of that particular being.
Red bee balm has a quality that is completely different from tulips. Rudbeckia is different again. The purple clematis that climbed the fence this summer had an energy I was not expecting and that I am still working out how to paint.
These two threads are separate but they are coming from the same place. Both are about making the invisible visible. Both are about taking seriously what is present around us that we have learned to glance past.
The Spiritual Case for Taking Flowers Seriously
I think we underestimate flowers because they are common.
They are in grocery stores and gas stations. They are given at funerals and first dates with equal casualness. They are background. They are decor.
But common does not mean ordinary. Common might mean that something is trying very hard to be in relationship with us.
The fact that flowers come back every year, that they are warm and bright and present and then gone and then back again, and that they mark the turning of seasons with their own reliable appearances, seems significant to me. Not in a symbolic way. In a literal way.
Something is there. Something is showing up.
The flower energy watercolors are my attempt to make that presence visible. To paint not the flower as an object but the flower as a being, with its own quality of energy, its own personality, and its own way of being in the world.
What Happens When You Actually Pay Attention
If you want to try this yourself, the entry point is simple.
Sit near a flower. Not to look at it, but to be with it. Let your awareness soften in the way it does in meditation. And notice what happens in your body.
Not what the flower is supposed to mean, not what you have read about it, and not what the internet says it symbolizes. What you actually sense.
This sounds very simple and it is. But simple is not always easy. Most of us are trained to look at a flower and immediately translate it into a category. Pretty. Spring. Gift. We skip the actual experience of the flower in favor of the label.
Skipping the label, even for a few minutes, is where the interesting stuff starts.
Flowers have been part of human spiritual practice across essentially every culture and tradition that has ever existed. That is not an accident. Something in us has always known that something is there.
The garden has been trying to tell you something. It might be worth sitting still long enough to hear it.