Courage and Grace: A Pasque Flower's Delicate Resilience
Choosing Love Against All Odds
And speaking of love I am in love with this brave, beautiful pasque flower, living just up the way from me on our small rocky hilltop. I know for a fact she has friends in the area, as they were blooming nearby last year. I discovered her last week—extremely early even for a pasque flower—on a particularly challenging day. Her presence filling me with hope and the promise of new life. As of today, she is still the only one to have bravely bloomed so far this spring, enduring snow fall and the possibility of a larger storm this coming weekend.
Pasque flowers—derived from the French word for Easter—are so named because they are among the first perennials to flower each spring. Their Latin name is Anemone patens, meaning wind spreading, which is apt, as they thrive in the most windswept, rocky, inhospitable and challenging of conditions. It is all the more remarkable given how fragile looking they are, covered with soft, tiny white hairs and a profusion of golden stems within the graceful purple bowl. These remarkable features not only contribute to their delicate beauty but serve to magnify and retain heat, keeping the hardy flower alive despite the circumstances.
My brave pasque flower sits atop a rocky promontory, overlooking the Continental Divide and directly in line for the bitter, gale force winds that come screaming off the high peaks. I ventured up to check on her during a recent light snow, wondering how she was faring.
She is the epitome of grace under fire, of resilience in the face of hardship. Though hardy, she refuses to become hardened. Through her exquisite presence, she transforms her environment rather than being transformed by it. She speaks of hope and new life simply by being an unexpected gift amid the rugged landscape. Her ability to capture and magnify both light and heat, empowers her to warm not only herself but smaller creatures needing refuge. She radiates life with her very being.
When I came upon my lovely pasque flower and her faithful companions last year, it was much later in the spring. Immediately, I knew I’d found the logo for my Broken Open substack—a faithful witness to the power of being broken open by life, even when it includes suffering.
We are going through incredibly challenging times not only here in America but across the world. Already many vulnerable people are feeling the brunt of cruel actions. Much is being required of all of us. How do we, like my pasque flower, find a way through this season without becoming hardened or broken by the journey?
I’m reminded of the extraordinary wisdom of Etty Hillesum, who wrote these words from within Westerbork transit camp, not long before her transport to Auschwitz, where she was killed at the age of twenty-nine. She understood the true power of love as an inner transformation that changes everything, even in the face of terrible circumstances.
Many feel that their love of mankind languishes at Westerbork because it receives no nourishment—meaning that people here don’t give you much occasion to love them. “The mass is a hideous monster; individuals are pitiful,” someone said. But I keep discovering that there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you. The fellow man himself has hardly anything to do with it. Oh Maria, it’s a little bit bare of love here, and I myself feel so inexpressibly rich; I cannot explain it.
Most, if not all, of us will feel the brunt of decisions being made in the halls of power, even those who may have voted for what they thought was promised, for whatever their reasons. Some will relish in that fact, saying they ‘got what they deserve.’ Some will demonize those wielding power in such hurtful ways. Such responses are completely understandable, but they only reinforce the broken situation in which we find ourselves.
It is much harder to choose the way of love. To welcome with open arms and a generous spirit those who think as I do and those who don’t. The decision to love others, regardless of their behavior, is as Etty describes, an elemental glow that sustains you. Much as a pasque flower holds and magnifies heat within a blizzard, the decision to love generates its own power to sustain.
Love means doing whatever we can to help those in need, to stand up for those who are vulnerable and be voices for liberty and justice, for mercy and solidarity. And it means making a space of welcome for those who are coming to realize they’ve been duped to join together as one, not rejecting nor shaming for being caught up in the lies. How we do this is as important as that we do it. Choosing to see each person as worthy of love, regardless of their behavior, requires courage as well as being grounded in a larger perspective.
We are finite beings in a finite journey, and we are all far more than that as well.
May we, with Etty, allow love to transform us from the inside out, that our presence may be wind spreading, radiating love as pasque flowers in the midst of this rocky landscape.
On Thursday evening, April 3rd, from 5-6:30pm MT, you are invited to join our live Cairn Circle reflection and conversation around resilience, love’s elemental glow and the power of love in the midst of the storm.
I am thankful for you and your courage to walk this way of love,
Elizabeth
