Hope is a Flower
Hope is a flower which blooms from the midst of our wounds. The wounds which seem to define every part of our being, past, present, and future. The same wounds which though they have formed scars, their pain is never forgotten.
“Hope is a flower
offered by scarred hands
Pain blooming beauty.”
For a weekend in June, about 35 creatives gathered in Winston-Salem, NC to attend the Cultivate Retreat hosted by thewayback2ourselves, and I was privileged to be there!
We cultivated many things, but one overarching theme was “Hope” for me. Made so much more real by a simple object lesson.
On the tables at each place, were small flowerpots, a packet of seeds and 2 small sheets of paper. At first, we all thought we received the same seeds, however we soon discovered everyone had different seeds.
This fascinated me, because we randomly chose our seats, which means our seeds were also a chance bestowment. Thinking they were a memento from our retreat theme of “cultivate”, we gave them only a passing thought.
But later, on the first day of presentations, we learned the purpose of our petite pots.
Encouraged to become exquisitely intimate with our seeds, our instructions included feeling our seeds, examining every minute detail of their appearance, and exhaustively researching every fact we could find about them.
Once accomplished, we then listed all the traits of our flowers on one of the sheets of paper in the flowerpot.
Taking the second sheet of paper, we listed our wound or wounds. The most painful memories which until now seemed to define our past, present and even our future.
Listing the wounds was more than difficult for me because the pain still felt so raw from many of them. As I stared at the small slip of paper, I heard the words which inflicted the piercing wounds all the way across the years.
The emotions I struggled to bury deep inside me rose to the surface, a deadly riptide pulling me under. Gaining just enough distance, I managed keeping them just below the surface until arriving home when I finished the project.
Once home, we were instructed to bury the slip of paper with the listed wounds in the flowerpot and plant our seeds.
This small lesson profoundly changed me.
As I buried my wounds of rejection, failure, worthlessness, feeling unseen and unheard, isolated, neglected, unloved, my heart felt free.
Then remarkably the “traits” of my Lilliput Zinnias, revealed the truth of who I am in very specific ways which I never saw before:
Bold, beautiful, thriving in the sun (oh, how I struggle in the winter months), welcoming, abundant, useful and resilient!
I am so excited to see my flowers bloom and was reminded of a quote which I keep on my desk:
“Here is what is beautiful about you, after everything you have been through, you are still blooming in the way you were meant to.”
Morgan Harper Nichols
Yes, Hope is a flower, offered by scarred hands, pain blooming beauty-what wounds do you need to bury today in order to see the truth about yourself?
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