MUM

My mother saw loving me and my brother, taking care of us all, as the primary focus of her life. As a child, who could ask for anything more than such love? Always adorning the houses my father built, were my mother’s beloved gardens filled with flowers.

So what was my mother’s favorite flower? Maybe it was the precious yellow lady slipper I have tenderly transplanted at least two times………hidden witin its modesty, the secret of the golden flower. In the ancient Taoist text of the same name, the seed kernel rising from the muddy depths below and turning into a large golden flower is anciently seen as a blossoming symbol of our own spiritual awakening. 

Inspired by incredibly beautiful Yugoslavian flowered aprons mothers embroidered at the birth of a daughter to be worn at all the significant events of their future lives, for one year, I made sketches of all the flowers that came my way. Having arranged all the sketches on a 4’ by 4’ panel around the flower mandala of Chartres Cathedral, I went to a seamstress hoping to learn the magic stitch……and then naively began. Ten years it took me, but that perseverance and patience was certainly dedicated somewhere in my innermost heart (that inner sanctum of the golden flower) to the irreplaceable foundational motherly love I had been blessed to receive as a child.