Week 17: The Magenta Signal
Thorns and Tender Blooms
Reflection
These late days of April emerge with colour intensely vibrant and noticeable signalling a shift from the bright, moisture laden greens of early spring to the hints of what is to come as heat and sunshine become more prominent than the south coast’s ubiquitous rains.
The magenta bloom of the Salmonberry is the embodiment of this joyous signal.
Symbolizing that all flourishing is mutual, the Heiltsuk and Nuu-chah-nulth believe the abundance of these blooms indicate the health of the coming salmon runs. These blooms are not only flowers but indications of what is yet to occur - a living prophecy.
These blooms also represent the idea of beauty existing between thorns. While salmonberry canes are covered in prickly thorns, they also produce some of the softest and vibrant of fruits.
We often view our scars, or personal upheavals, such as grief or failures, as wasted parts of our lives that we want to move past. The salmonberry suggest that these in between moments, our liminal spaces, are actually necessary for our maximum potential to arise.
Our successs often only arise from the opening created by a wound.
Evidence & Ecology
Rooting into their footprint as disruptors by bringing stability to broken ground, salmonberries preferred habitat classifies them as groundbreakers; pioneer species that find threshold areas to make their home.
Found at the edges of logging roads, ditches and areas of disturbed earth that may be lacking stability or nutrients that other flowering shrubs or berries may need to flourish, these brightly coloured, prickly bushes see wasted areas as optimal places to call home.
Growing in the gaps left by trauma, such as logging or erosion, their roots begin to weave the soil togehter and become the first wave of life to return.
What is raw and vulnerable becomes a harbour of sustainability as the flowers, followed by the berries feed an array of beings - insects, hummingbirds, bears and even humans. And in a perfect dance of succession the decades long life span of this ubiquitous BC berry makes way for future species to thrive, creating nourished and stable soil that invites the second wave of organism to make their home.
What liminal spaces are you ignoring in your life, thinking these disturbed parts are wasted areas, instead of potential for creativity and growth?
How can we mirror bringing grace to a landscape that feels broken in our own lives, utilizing our own history of disturbance to provide “shade” or “nectar” for others who are currently in their own state of disruption?
Spiritual or emotional growth does not require the perfect conditions to flourish. True resilience is the ability to transform our own “ditch”. Our holiness is found in our grit.
Where can you apply these lessons to your life?
Embodying Practice
Embodied Nature Meditation
Hummingbird Reciprocity
Find a comfortable place to sit, possibly a “sit spot” near or in a blooming salmonberry thicket. If that is not available to you, find a space that is inviting and allow yourself to visualize being amongst the salmonberries. You can also use the photograph in the linked audio meditation to “be among the salmonberries”.
Notice the brightly coloured magenta blossoms and the prickly, protective canes of the plant.
Close your eyes and visualize a bright magenta light at your heart center……
Story of Place
A Conversation with the Season
A Covenant of Interconnection and Prophecy
Becoming attuned to the cycles of nature and the constant turning of seasons is a way for humans to honour our living environment. Through the simple act of noticing. Of remembering. We become reminded how to be in conversation with the life forms around us. The living environment that sustains us. Our existence is not only supported by Gaia’s gifts, it is intricately woven into the tapestry of our breath and blood.
Walking in the BC forest during late April offers a sensory experience full of a beauty and uniqueness not replicable at any other time. With the cycles in the natural world in constant circular motion, you are only guaranteed to experience a particular phenomenon if you have the patience to wait for the same seasonal rhythms to return each year.
Awash in green, pollen drifting silently through the air, yet coating your body and announcing itself to those afflicted with hayfever, the first bursts of brilliant colour declare themselves with a jolly ebullience in the liminal spaces between trail and forest edge, oftentimes in ditches.
Thriving where the soil has been disturbed, salmonberries, are a key pioneer species moving into areas where not much else will grow. These gorgeous flowers often guide me along my route at the edge of an old logging road, beckoning the explorer to keep following the beacons of magenta.
In my continual education in foraging the BC backcountry, salmonberries were one of the first species to pass from hand to mouth once edible status was confirmed. But before the berries, the flora.
Each year my interest in this delicate fruit increased, as I began to learn their traditional territories and bushes, oftentimes heavy with fruit. After learning their growth patterns, it became clear that without early spring rains - the grey, heavy mists interspersed with deluges - these bushes would not bear fruit. After a few dry and unseasonably warm February’s and March’s the bushes would remain green, with no discernible flowers to punctuate the blue skies and green canvas….
The Invitation
Nature Kinship
Weekly nature connection practices aligned seasonally to engage with your locale. Encouraging immersion, appreciation and spiritual attunement with the more than human world around you.
Always remember to enjoy these practices within the bounds of your physical and ecological limits (do not sit outside when it’s -40, or walk on slippery surfaces), practice “leave no trace” and mindful reciprocity (take only what you need, ask permission from the earth, and only leave what is naturally biodegradable)
The Art Practice
The Beauty within the Thorns
This exercise uses the physical structure of the salmonberry plant as a metaphor for personal boundaries and resilience.
Begin with a large piece of paper. On the outer edges, use charcoal or dark ink to draw "thorns" or prickly lines representing the boundaries and defenses you have built for protection….
A Final Note
Closing Invocation
I return again/ Like the blossoms in Spring / I return again / To break the lock of the prison / And to break the grip of the mind
Singing the Earth
All photos copyright
Nature. Connected.
