Rewilding and Rooting with the Wild Rose
Creative Activities and Prompts
This wonderful rose with only five petals is ancient, resilient, graceful, wild. In folklore, it is associated to love that goes beyond time and death. In my life, it is connected to nostalgia, or better still Sehnsucht, the German word for an undefined yearning for something unknown, mysterious, discreet, profound and secret, maybe an inner home-coming beyond all experienced circumstances.
When I walk in the wood, or the country lanes surrounding my place, the wild rose heralds advanced Spring, yet it is all except an uncomplicated season, as where I live Spring often comes with showers and lightning storms. The wild rose holds contradictions in a nice poise: sweetness and bitterness, beauty and wildness, strength and grace. It is about the ancient “both… and” mindset that used to be a feature of magic: the ability to hold contradictions not as incompatible, but as dynamic polarities along a spectrum.
