'The Farmers Bouquet'

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most important religious rites of ancient Greece, practiced for nearly two thousand years, attended by Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, who called the initiates "not only happier, but better and more just." The process took nine days. Fasting, ritual, grief, procession, descent into darkness. Then: the revelation.

No initiate ever revealed what was shown. They took the oath and kept it. But one ancient source — Hippolytus, in the third century, scandalized and betraying — wrote that the final mystery shown to the initiates was this: a single stalk of grain, held up in silence.

The mystery was ordinary. The farmer always knew. The question was whether you had been prepared to see what was already there.

This is for the woman who has grown things from seed and understands that this is a spiritual practice.