The Essence of the Rose
I am completely besotted with the rose these days. Its getting difficult to have a day go by without at least one rose finding its way into a vase which I place somewhere in our home. I have always enjoyed them in my garden, other peoples gardens or just wild by the side of the road. Wherever I find them I have gotten to the point that I have to stop and smell them and my artist husband, Nazim, is quite used to this by now. My passion for them is getting deeper as I learn more about them and see how valuable they are in our everyday lives and how profoundly important they have been historically in so many areas including sacred feminism.
As we seek out information about the rose we will find the fictional name Rose Line popularized by Dan Brown in his 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code. A YouTube search will give you a glimpse into what one author refers to as the Mary Magdalene, twin centered rose.
We can explore rose flower essences which offer a similar concept to homeopathic remedies. We can even create our own beautiful guided meditation while focussing on a single rose and perhaps diffusing rose oil for a bit of rose aromatherapy. It seems the possibilities are endless once we open up to the inclusion of the rose in our spiritual practices if we use our imagination and have an open mind.
Once you begin to search about how to incorporate the essence of the rose into your own life it indeed becomes a fascinating journey. But what is the rose, technically? The rose (rosa) gets a description just like any other flower and is deemd a woody perennial of the genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae. We can find over 100 species of roses. They c! an be er ect shrubs, climbing or trailing plants, ancient or modern, with stems that are often armed with sharp thorns. Rose flowers are large and beautifully showy, in colours ranging from white through yellows and reds and every hue including nearly black, in between.
Most species of rose are native to Asia, with smaller numbers native to Europe, North America, and northwest Africa. Species, cultivars and hybrids are all widely grown for their beauty and exquisite fragrance. Rose plants range in size from compact, miniature roses, to climbers that can reach 7 meters in height. Different species hybridize easily, and this has been used in the development of the wide range of garden roses. Today they sport famous names to designate one from the other and it is indeed an honor to have a rose named after you.
The rose figures often as an image system in films and also takes center stage in books. One of my favorite authors, Kathleen McGowan,uses the ancient spiritual practice of walking a labyrinth to guide her readers through a spiritual process in her non-fiction book entitled, The Source of Miracles: Seven Steps to Transforming Your Life Through the Lords Prayer, which uses the Lords Prayer as a way to experience the miraculous in life and awaken to the fact that life is indeed a gift. At the center of the labyrinth, Kathleen tells us, is the Rose with Six Petals, and each petal of the flower corresponds to a teaching of the prayer: faith; surrender; service; abundance; forgiveness; and conquering obstacles. The center of the flower represents the essence of a wellspring of love, as love is the uniting factors in all aspects of our lives. When place ourselves in the active state of loving our entire being functions at its healthiest on all levels. Love offers us the ideal state of being and becoming our higher selves, at the same time. The rose may be used to symbolize this state of bliss. The rose has not! only a history of being a beautiful flower but does indeed contain all these deeply spiritual feelings to people all over the world and everywhere we search for its essence.
