Fleur de Lettuce

I've known Jay for nearly a year. On the linear time continuum, he's a fairly new friend, but on the big Time continuum it seems we’ve always known one another. Jay owns a nursery, but he also trades his eggs, or better said his hens’ eggs for my blueberry jam. This weekend he surprised me with this beautiful head of star romaine lettuce.

Upon arriving home, I took it out of the bag and oddly thought of the tower of Babel from a large illustrated Bible I won for selling so many somethings as an eight year old.

As I continued looking, I saw theFrench fleur de lis or in this case the fleur de lettuce.
Wait, to be truly honest after the tower and before le fleur, I stood in my kitchen and said aloud, “This symbolizes a penis rising out of a vagina.” I nearly edited that because it seems so strange but that is what I saw and said.
Now I look at the photo and see how I came up with a tower. I see structure, leaves layered upon one another like floors of a building reaching skyward, kin to our modern day multi-storied towers, from which we look out surveying the kingdom, modern man’s way possibly of still trying to reach or be God.
I also realize how I saw the male and female anatomy in the lettuce. I was seeing the masculine and feminine and there’s nothing actually strange about that. We don’t talk of food in this way, but this is how we are fed. Like the feminine, a seed lies in the soil, the stuff of Earth’s womb, receptively receiving until it is time, like the masculine, to take action. The star romaine models a balanced masculine and feminine birthing fruit from a joint endeavor.

I decided to read a bit about the fleur de lis and discover it has appeared in many civilizations and means not only "flower of the lily” but also “of the lotus” and signifies, “perfection, light and life.” What a beautiful, a holy trinity - the lily, lotus and lettuce.
Then I recall Jay said this was a star romaine. I went in search of the star and there it was on the part of the lettuce that had been nearest Mother Earth. I think of stars as being of the heavens and the Universe, but stars are energy and light. This makes me truly smile. The stuff of the stars lies in the dark, in the dark earth providing energy for the growth of the plants, nourishing our bodies and minds.

The beautiful head of lettuce, just as the fleur de lis, is truly perfection, light and life. The star romaine reminds us that we may seek God in the heavens, but the energy of the Divine is as close as our feet, loving home to us, providing the foods we eat.
Regardless of how we got here, Nature speaks a language that if we listen deeply we hear, a language of perfection, light and life found in the lily, lotus, lettuce and us.

It is not Babel. It is beautiful.

-Dawn! Imagine the Shift! 5/17/10