Cowslip (primula veris) has many names: Herb Peter, Key Flower, Key of Heaven, Peter's Keys, Fairy Cups, Plumrocks...and rich, even sometimes obscure symbolism. But there is one symbolic sense we might find particularly helpful — Cowslip as symbolic of pensiveness. Pensive comes from the Latin to French meaning: to consider, to ponder, to weigh carefully, to engage in deep serious thought, to contemplate or meditate.
Running along a nearby sidewalk, there is a long, walled garden at the bottom of a sloped lawn. The four foot wall at the sidewalk level seems to have been built years ago to keep the soil from washing out in the rain. Most of the plants in the garden are ground covers, further ensuring the soil stay in place. Recently, I met the elderly woman who appears to have the care of the garden and we got talking about one plant she knew nothing about and had apparently forgotten but which I had seen blooming the previous week. Upon my investigation it turns out the plant is called Cowslip. It is not native to the United States but has found its way here by way of Europe and Asia.
Cowslip's leaves might look like something we'd see in a season green salad. The papery flowers are small, bright yellow and trumpet or cup like, standing in little clusters atop thin, upright, ten inch stems. The lady said, "I think I can give you a piece of that plant." Delighted, I ran off for my hand tools and a small Tupperware to hold the rooted plant, while jogging 300 steps where I planted it immediately under a witch hazel tree, affording it the filtered sun it prefers. So I will wait a full year now before I see it bloom again in its new home — each time, bringing better thoughts, more helpful, peaceful, pensive thoughts to mind.
To be personally planted in pensiveness. That may sound like a too high an ideal, but let's not to be discouraged —here is Thomas Merton's entry for May 2, 1948 when the whole monastery was ostensibly silent for a Day of Recollection:
My interior activity must begin gradually to die down (but it tends to increase!) All the useless twisting and turning of my nature, analyzing the faults of the community and the choir, figuring out what is wrong with everything and what could be right, comparing our life to the 12th century with what we have today, trying to figure some way to make a break and get into solitude: with all these things I have lost time and made myself suffer, and I have ruined the work of God in my soul.
Wind and sun. Catbirds bickering in a bush. Ringing bells and blowing whistles and birds squawking in a lamentable fashion. Trees are all clothed and benches are out: a new summer has begun."
Of course, bickering Catbirds, ringing bells, blowing whistles, birds squawking...are all much more figures of his interior state of mind than a simple report of what's going on in the Gethsemane Monastery gardens.
