Columbine ~ Mary's Footsteps

This lovely purple Columbine is blooming near the chapel here. It grows in dappled light under an Arborvitae, so the sun doesn't scorch it. Columbines used to be called Mary's Slippers. I'm thinking maybe it's the flower in bud that more resembles a slipper. Be that as it may, I would finetune it abit and simply call the flower, Mary's Footsteps.

Remembering Mary's footsteps, her Visitation comes to mind — her hastily arranged journey to share with her elder relative, Elizabeth, the  happy new of her pregnancy and her prayer-declaration, "For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name," Luke 1:49. Another translation says, "The Lord has done marvels for me..." We can all announce that!

I'm color-blind, but the May trees are such a green, even I can see it.

That there is a light spring rain this early morning,

That the bees made the honey for my A.M. tea,

That there are such good people in my life,

That I was taught to read as a young boy,

That I had a wonderful dinner with my sister this week,

That the robin is still sitting on her nest in the peach tree,

That my phone takes photographs,

That this computerized message will go around the world...

   you get the idea.

But there is more. In the Middle Ages the Columbine was considered an important medical herb used as a cure for "pestilence." How appropriate is this for today. The word pestilence usually refers to the plague, but it can also refer to anything that is considered harmful or evil. How un-Christly, when someone thinks of others as a pestilence.  In which case, a heart can be pestilent — poisoned. 

We need to stop wondering so much about other people and give our energies more to recounting the Lord's marvels. There are so many!

Introductions for Life

My father introduced me to the spiritual world by taking me to dark, incensed, wooden churches on Sunday afternoons, where we'd light candles in blue and red glasses. But my mother introduced me to gardening.

I have a small photograph of her when she was three years old, standing in her Maspeth, Queens backyard. She's wearing a little girl's collared cape, standing on a brick path alongside a narrow curbed garden. There are terracotta pots containing vine-y plants trailing along a wire fence behind her. When my family left the Bronx apartment in 1953 for life in the suburbs, there was a back yard where she started her own gardens along the edge of the new white post and plank fence. 

Long Island had provided Manhattan with its potatoes since the early 1800's, and when the land was transformed into suburbia in the late 1940's, it seems the top soil was taken away, a pebble-y, sandy soil left behind. It was out of that pretty useless stuff that my mother grew some rather amazing, lightly fragranced, red climbing roses; brilliantly colored, lacquer-petaled portulaca (which does best in sand); purple iris, and whatever Mothers Day plants were to be had in those days. 

One afternoon when I was eight, I found myself kneeling on the grass, helping her to transplant a Columbine from a clay pot. It wasn't blooming at the time, but I thought the Italian Parsley-like leaves to be attractive, all the more so when the rain beaded, acting like magnifying glasses, affording me a deeper look. Sometimes the drops lined up along the leaf edges or puddled in the center where the new, lighter green leaves, were taking shape.

My ancestry report says the ancient relatives on my paternal side, were 17% Scottish, English and Welsh, and 50% Irish—from Ulster, Tyron, Londonderry, Antrim and Roscommon. So, I'm a Celt, and the Celts believed the Columbine to be a protection against evil and that it stood at the portal to the world of dreams and visions.

I think there are experiences in our lives, if even frozen moments, that somehow portend the future. I've been protected against alcoholism, depression and suicide. I've been kept alive and safe from the invasion of a parish priest who exploited and further weakened our family, abusing me and another of my siblings. And out of that experience, and long, garden-like inner tending,  a vision and dream of personal salvation has emerged. Not an eternal rest in a cloudy neverland of heavenly delights, but the salvation and new vision for myself of sanity, evolution and creativity, with my spirit-world intact.

But these themes are often fragile, like the  Columbine, which is particularly susceptible to the ruinous leaf-miner. And so, I plant a new one every spring, solicitous of its vulnerability and always grateful.