THE POWER OF A FLOWER
Henri Matisse
Explore a flower, hold it in your gaze, in your hand, smell it, touch it, see it with reverence that acknowledges its very being and the beauty of that. Then you will simultaneously contact that same being which you also are. Not as a separate thing, “me” and “the flower “ but as one thing; one seeing, one spirit in all its myriad expressions.
“Observe without the word”
J. Krishnamurti
When most of us look at a flower, our minds automatically label what we see. The observer is our mind; it judges, evaluates, accepts and rejects from memory, from the past. The observer mind is the past. It takes our fresh, alive experience now and translates it with past memories, with stored, stale and substituted “experience”. To truly see is to look without thinking about what we see. To look at a flower without the image that we have of it, or the word that we have for it. To simply see what is without knowing what is.
That which delights in the flower is our common nature; it is what we are. This awareness is like the scent of a flower, subtle and pervasive, seen yet unseen, known yet unknown by any mere descriptive.
What is a flowers nature? From where does it come? The nature of you and the flower is identical; it is the nature of Self, of reality, of existence. And this Self nature is love. A love scent that is our own nature.
To contemplate the flower is to introduce our self to our Self. To know our being not only sensually or as a thought, but to re-cognize our essence, to apprehend that that which sees and that which is seen are one and the same mystery, and to tremble like flower petals in this gentle breeze of subtle being. This is the movement of life, moment to moment. At once, living and dying. At once, here and not here. At once, known and not known.
You and a flower are majesty enfolded in mystery.
