Floral Alchemy

The earliest memory I have is sitting beneath a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, having a picnic with my great-grandmother’s collie, and a whole party that existed only in my head. I was alone and entirely not alone. The land was the party. The dog knew it. I knew it. The oak knew it. Nobody had to say so.

I was an only child. That meant I was well-trained early in the art of inventing my own reality — no louder sibling to interrupt the frequency. This place was always the blank canvas and I always knew exactly what to paint on it. Something was pulling me. I didn’t have a name for it. I just followed.

The meat of life tends to happen. We grow up. The world gets loud. Commitments slide into the positions once held by discovery and play, and responsibility speaks so loudly it drowns out everything else. Wonder is like a muscle: if you don’t flex it, it grows quiet. It doesn’t leave you. It waits.

And I came back to it. I returned to this land — the one where the oak still stands — and I built.

Not a decorative garden. Not a vegetable garden to feed my family. Not a designed space to walk around feeling stoic. I built a garden of everything. Every variable that had ever pulled wonder out of me, planted and tended and given room. Pollinator strips so wild and unruly they made no sense to anyone not already airborne — the spice markets of Istanbul, if spice were pollen and the merchants were bees. A maze. A Temple of Bloom. A winding stone-pathed herb garden stocked with everything a medicine woman or shaman might require. Fruit trees, figs, every berry you can imagine — walked through like a Roman emperor luxuriously sampling the fruits of the land. Open spaces set precisely where the sun drops in September.

I designed, dug and built as if I was trying to entice a goddess to appear.

I was.

Wonder didn’t just re-appear. It arrived to hold court. Not as a summer home, not as a stop between palaces, but as a permanent installation. I take this as a high compliment. Wonder has all its needs met to stay here indefinitely. The perfect shrine. I attend diligently and am rewarded thusly.

I would like to think the magic is in me. But to be most direct: I didn’t dream to bring the magic to me. The magic pulled me to it.

There is a moment I want to tell you about.

I was standing in the garden the way you stand in something you love — with nothing but full attention and generosity — when I reached my hand out and a bee landed on it. Just landed. Regarded me. Flew away.

Another time, a bee was drowning in a dish of water. I put my finger in. He walked up and out. He didn’t sting me.

He didn’t sting me because we work for the same boss. We are on the same team. Like recognizes like.

People don’t expect to have this experience. But I do. It happens to me now. Not because I am special — because I am paying attention in a particular way, in a particular key, and the living world responds to it. It always has. I just had to make my world, my life, and my mind quiet enough to recalibrate to the frequency of wonder. And once I found it, I locked in. I have not lost the signal since.

My home sits atop a civilization that predates the Cahokia mounds by four hundred years. The field I walk across every morning, the garden I tend — this is where a prehistoric civilization called home. Where ceremonial burial mounds once stood. They still stand. I protect them.

Beneath all of it, an extensive network of limestone caves. The people who lived here before believed those chambers connected this world to others. On a still day, I can feel cool air rising from the vaults below. Others feel it too. I have stopped trying to explain it. It already makes perfect sense to me.

I want to say something about what happened to me, because I think some part of it may be happening to you.

When you first wake up to a different kind of consciousness — and I don’t mean that as a cliché, I mean the actual experience of the world becoming more present, more alive, more communicative than you were ever told it would be — the first instinct is to reach for a framework. Are there beings coming? Is this an ancient mystery finally revealing itself? The rabbit holes are numerous and well-worn and I have walked down more than a few of them.

Where I landed, after all of it, is simpler than any framework and harder than most: be the best human you can. Be good. Be kind. Be loving. Share beauty. And remember — we are not the most important creatures alive.

That last one is the one that changes everything.

We were never meant to be the center. This centering — this hubris — has cost us more than we have yet reckoned. And what is happening now, the growing insistence of the natural world, the way the living systems around us seem to be demanding our attention — that is not punishment. It is love. The living world is getting louder because it wants us back. Not in dominion. In relationship. In the proportion we were always meant to occupy. One voice in a vast and ancient conversation, not the only voice in the room.

That is what I hear in the garden. That is what the bee on my finger is saying. That is what the cool air rising from the limestone below is saying.

When I say home, I mean something specific.

I mean the feeling of being so absorbed in something living that you forget to be separate from it. I mean the somatic memory — the one in your body, not your mind — of the last time you looked at a flower so long it seemed to change. The time you held very still and something wild trusted you. The afternoon you were a child in some green place and time stopped making sense in the best way.

You remember that feeling.

That is your home. It hasn’t gone anywhere. Other things got louder. That’s all.

To recenter wonder in your life is not to become someone different. It is to come home to who you actually are, and what that means — not just for you, but for every living thing in relationship with you. That relationship, among all of us beings, is the home I am talking about.

I found my way back. I held the door open. That is why I am here.

And here is what the door looks like.

Flowers are my language. They always have been. So when something began speaking to me through them — I won’t name it more specifically than that — flowers were the logical channel. The path of least friction. Something I could follow without it being strange.

The first time I listened, I listened casually. The second time, I committed fully. It worked beyond anything I expected.

Then one afternoon, a friend drove out to the farm. She harvested flowers here sometimes; she wanted to pay me back. She brought resin. She dipped one of my most beautiful dried zinnias into it and I thought she had ruined it completely. I was heartbroken.

But then she showed me the molds. Small silicone cavities, just big enough for earrings. I chose two melampodium buds I had been saving — for what, I didn’t yet know. I placed them in. The resin went over them.

That visit was fifteen minutes long. It was the only instruction I have ever received. Within weeks, the molds were gone. I learned to build forms instead — to sculpt them, to use natural sunlight to slow the cure or speed it. We didn’t know the proper way to work with resin. So we made our own.

Everything since has been experimentation, conversation, and trust. The flowers lead. I follow.

Here’s where you probably expect a long and dry explanation of what I do. But the truth is I can’t tell you exactly what I do, because it implies I have a plan — which I do not.

I move through the world differently now. I have become, I think, what I was always in the process of inventing — the only child under the oak, still at her picnic, except now the whole living world has pulled up a chair. The reality you imagine with enough love and enough attention and enough willingness to follow where it leads eventually becomes the one you actually live in. I am a product of my own imagination. And the world confirmed every word of it.

All of my senses are heightened: colors are brighter, details sharper and more poignant. The sounds. The smells. The feel of things. The joy of simply watching. So much information, but not in an overwhelming way — more like being a scientist with a whole field team, intentionally taking readings, collecting samples, documenting everything. Only that is my brain, my mental experience, every single day.

Wonder is everywhere, trying to lure me into closer study of this or that — like barkers along a boardwalk, each trying to seduce me for my attention and hold me in their thrall. Every day are moments not waiting to be discovered, but already lined up single file so that as soon as my undivided attention is available, I walk a gauntlet of unending possibilities — all the most beautiful and exotic wonder auditioning for the one that can grab me and hold me the longest.

If I could have envisioned heaven, I surely live in it. These encounters — these afternoons, these brief trysts with all the different flavors of wonder that lurk in the garden, in the groves, along the bluffs, growing wild and feral in dangerous places — it never gets old. I can’t imagine a finer way to pass my hours.

We make our own realities. Mine is full of endless unmined details, worlds and realms and impossibly possible things and characters. Of course it is. I made it. And every day I make it again.

And if any of this sounds familiar — if something in here rang a bell you forgot you had — then you already know where this is going. You’ve been here before. Some green place. Some still afternoon. Something living that stopped you in your tracks and held you there long enough to remember what you are.

That feeling is your home.

It hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s plenty of room in here.