THE WILDFLOWERING WAY: Learning to Bloom in the Disturbed Soil of Our Lives
This article first appeared in the May/June 2017 issue of The Owl: https://sacredstoriesmedia.com/theowl/
The summer after I turned 22, I drove cross country for the first time. More than a road trip, that summer was an awakening.
Why? Because of the wildflowers.
Everywhere I went, I saw them. Beautiful multi-colored gorgeous. But there was one problem. The wildflowers bloomed not off in some photoworthy field. Oh, no! They came up by the side of the road where the asphalt met the dirt, surrounded by old pop cans and cigarette butts. Mile after mile those wildflowers brought me joy, even as I was annoyed with the tarmac and litter for ruining their perfection.
One day, chatting with a park ranger, I shared my mock dismay at the wildflowers' unaesthetic roadside location. My sense of humor was lost on Ranger Rick, who earnestly replied, "Wildflowers simply grow best where the soil is disturbed."
His quiet observation proved the gift of a lifetime.
Over the years, I have come to recognize the messy soil — where the asphalt meets the dirt and the litter of life accumulates — as the most beautifully contradictory yet fundamentally hopeful place there is! In fact, this fertile liminal space is the Crucible of Change, the fundamental place where we must all risk sowing the seeds of our deepest selves and greatest hopes.
We are brought up to believe that dualities define our world. We build walls to divide us (whoever we are) from them (the ones who scare us). But what if we had the courage to see that, precisely this disturbed soil between two conflicting ideologies, where our differences push up against one another, gives us the opportunity to seed a new inter-reality, where we can bloom together?
What if we changed the paradigm that saw our side as right and someone else’s side as wrong, to one that saw both sides as equal and necessary participants in the creation of a transformative third space — one nurtured, in fact, by our seeming opposition. A space where my “right” and your “wrong” disturb the impacted dirt between us, thus actually alchemizing that hard ground into the best possible soil to plant the seeds which allow a whole new way of being to germinate?
This is exactly what I have learned during a lifetime working, teaching and practicing in liminal interdisciplinary, interfaith, interspiritual, interpolitical spaces. To be sure, the threshold between known and unknown, fear and love, between hope and horror, comfort and change, is often wildly unpleasant at first. Because it asks us to throw away the safety of the familiar. But when we do, we learn to wildflower. Which is to say, we blossom into a whole new way of living.
Wildflowers dare so many of the things we are told never to risk. They resist cultivation by always seeding themselves to the winds of change. The let themselves be taken wherever they can grow — in any field alongside any other flowers that will have them. The wildflowers we love most are precisely the ones that grow in riotous multicolored abundance in those places where we least expect them to flourish. Right there with the weeds and the trash. Sometimes we don’t even know which is a weed and which a wildflower. And it doesn’t matter. Because wildflowers do the one thing that most of us spend our lifetimes resisting. They surrender to anything that will allow them to grow and bloom, no matter what or where or with whom that might be.
The Sufi mystic Rumi has been exhorting us to wildflower for centuries. He wrote:
Be crumbled
so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
When we are willing to crumble our deeply-entrenched dualities — to depart from a stony binary world of separation to enter a new triune world of reconciliation — we surrender to the ultimate healing. We wildflower in the field that Rumi knew existed beyond all our learned ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing: The Unified Field of Love where we all will blossom whole together!
You can read more about The Wildflowering Way in Victoria Price’s new book, The Way of Being Lost: A Road Map to Your Truest Self, due out from Dover Publications in February 2018. Victoria is also the author of Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, published by St Martins Press in 1999 and re-released by Open Road Media in 2014. To learn more about Victoria’s work as an inspirational speaker, a joy blogger, an interfaith/interspiritual minister, a writer, artist, and designer, please visit www.victoriaprice.com.
