Radiance Needs Roots

The body was never meant for endless summer...

With the light from above, tempered by rooting in the dark moisture from below…I bloom…in seasons and cycles and through ancient wisdom spirals.

This was the message my flowers gave me this morning.

I sat in the garden, sipping my morning cup of dandy blend, watching them open themselves shamelessly beneath the intense radiant sun, while bird songs filled the airways. No hesitation or apology. No bargaining with their own nature. Just an honest turning toward what nourishes them.

And yet, what struck me most was this:

Their openness to the light is only possible because they remain rooted in the dark.

Every bloom is being fed by what cannot immediately be seen ~ deep moisture, tangled roots, rich decay, underground intelligence. The flower and the soil are not separate events. The radiance above is sustained by the mystery below.

Without that relationship to depth, they would scorch.

“Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river…”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

And suddenly I could see the imbalance so many of us are moving through right now. Many of us seeing it for the first time.

We have been taught to orient almost entirely toward the “light” ~ productivity, visibility, constant growth, performance, forward motion, transcendence, achievement, optimization. We are praised for how much we can hold, produce, endure, and overcome.

But without the inherent wisdom of the Feminine ~ the cyclical, rooted, receptive, instinctive intelligence that knows when to rest, soften, retreat, grieve, digest, and replenish ~ eventually even light becomes too much.

We burn out before our appointed season.

Nature does not bloom this way.

The flowers do not force themselves open all at once. They do not remain in perpetual peak bloom to prove their worthiness. They spiral. They pulse. They respond. They open and close according to conditions. They trust timing.

And perhaps this is the deeper invitation right now:

Not to reject the light, but to remain deeply rooted while receiving it.

To allow ourselves to be nourished by darkness again ~ by stillness, embodiment, mystery, slowness, feeling, wintering, silence, and the unseen processes that sustain real life.

Because radiance without rootedness eventually becomes extraction.

But rooted radiance that is sustainable. That is alive. That is wise!

Lately I can feel this shift happening inside my own body. A slowing, a settling. A deeper anchoring into myself. Less pushing. Less overriding. More moments of realizing that this moment ~ exactly as it is ~ may actually be trustworthy.

My herb/flower garden reminds me that spiraling is not failure, that cycles are not regression and rest is not absence.

And darkness is not the opposite of life.

Sometimes the dark is what keeps the bloom alive.

Maybe this is what the Feminine has been trying to teach us all along:

How to stay connected to the underground rivers while opening to the sun.

How to bloom without abandoning ourselves to exposure.

How to open only as fast as we can remain rooted.

“The wild nature has a vast integrity to it… to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to…” -Clarissa Pinkola Estes