April Showers Bring May Flowers

Spring is in full bloom and it’s hard not to notice the abundance of flowers emerging.  I have been thinking about the phrase “April showers bring May flowers,” and decided to look up its origin.  The phrase seems to originate from a poem by Matilda Blind in the 1800s.  It’s worth sharing, so here it is below:

April Rain

The April rain, the April rain 

Comes slanting down in fitful showers,

Then from the furrow shoots the grain,

And banks are fledged with nestling flowers; 

And in grey shaw and woodland bowers

The cuckoo through the April rain

Calls once again.

The April sun, the April sun,

Glints through the rain in fitful splendour,

And in grey shaw and woodland dun

The little leaves spring forth and tender

Their infant hands, yet weak and slender,

For warmth towards the April sun,

One after one.

And between shower and shine hath birth

The rainbow’s evanescent glory;

Heaven’s light that breaks on mists of earth!

Frail symbol of our human story,

It flowers through showers where, looming hoary

The rain-clouds flash with April mirth,

Like life on earth.

by Matilda Blind (1841-1896)

Do we ‘flower through showers,’ our rainbow-like spiritual light shining more visibly after the trials we face have cleansed us and brought us down to our essence?  Are we like Persephone, more powerful and able to move with grace between the realms, only after we have been touched by trauma or at least by the loss of our naiveté?   If we are, then after this period of collective trauma, as we move forward with vaccinations and emergence in to public spaces (hopefully soon), we will likely not be exactly as we were.  It has been a full year now of varying degrees of isolation, fear, loss, and intensity, of looking within, as the outward life contracted, and of rapidly adapting to new and changing circumstances.  As we watch the flowers of Spring bloom, we might also ask what is new within ourselves.  What have we seen in ourselves, during this time of underworld?  What new aspects have grown within us?  What has changed?

In the Nahualismo tradition, rain is not the symbol of strife, but of healing and renewal, as in many cultures.  This is logical, as rain is the element that washes the earth and allows for things to grow in beauty.  Of course, that washing can be destructive in its process of cleansing and nurturing new fertility.  Flowers are our image of enlightenment, or something close to what that word denotes.  They represent both what we create in harmony with the consent of the earth, and the complete system of recreating ourselves by changing the way we dream, healing our ancestral influences, balancing our emotions, recovering our discipline to do what seems impossible, and reaching down to heal the underworlds of our unconscious and up to co-create, with the heavens, our highest possibility.  Now is a good time to consider what the circumstances of this year have created in us.  As we begin to walk forward, how are we different within ourselves and with each other?  There may be more time to wait, and there may be more healing to do, but ultimately we will be moving forward soon.  Since we can’t go back to what we were exactly, and will not likely feel as invulnerable, how can we go forward as something more?

In the meantime, it is Spring and the flowers are blooming.  The world around us is alive with new possibility and expansion, and we are not separate from it.  In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore talks about animus mundi, the important cosmovision that holds all the elements in our world as alive with soul.  He writes of the need to feed our own souls with this sense of interconnection and with beauty.  He says, “We assume that our loneliness has to do with other people, but it also comes from our estrangement from a world that we have depersonalized by our philosophies.” (p. 271)  He is referring to our way of prizing progress and usefulness above all things, thinking of the body as a machine and our modern world as a marvel of thought, technology, and engineering, rather than a mystery with a soul that can teach us, feed us, and reflect to us our deepest nature.  The soul longs for beauty, meaning, and connection. 

Right now the flowers are singing these songs to anyone who will listen.  Our suggestion this month is to step outside.  Take it in.  Feed your soul with beauty and expansion.  And, listen to what they might have to say to you.  Ask them what inside you is ready to flower.  Ask them what new possibility is now able to emerge?  Ask them to help to heal your heart where it feels darkest and most tender.  Stretch what feels contracted, and receive it.

Thomas more says:  “The word passion means basically ‘to be affected,’ and passion is the essential energy of the soul.  The poet Rilke describes this passive power in the imagery of the flower’s structure, when he calls it a ‘muscle of infinite reception.’  We don’t often think of the capacity to be affected as strength and as the work of a powerful muscle, and yet for the soul, as for the flower, this is its toughest work and its main role in our lives.”  (p. 280)

This month, when you draw a card from your favorite oracle deck, or turn to your best mode of sacred divining, ask how you have been affected by this uncanny, often difficult, possibly traumatic year?  What needs tending now?  And conversely, what might be possible that wasn’t before?  We won’t be able to just return to what we were, as if nothing had happened, but what can we find if we ask what we can be now?

May you flower, in all the ways you most need.

Ometeotl.

-This blog was written by Melusina Gomez, originally for publication with the eleventh house.