The Golden Chain Tree in full bloom looks like a giant Christmas tree lit up with candles. It reminds me of a celebration, a ceremony, and like special celebrations, it’s very special for a time and then it’s gone. The Golden Chain Tree flowers in late spring/early summer: a reminder to enjoy the moment. In the midst of grandeur, it’s also a reminder to enjoy the small moments. That’s the message from the Golden Chain Tree one day after the New Moon in May 2018.

I’ve made flower essences from our garden before and I had wanted to make a Golden Chain Tree flower essence for a few years. A flower has a blueprint or energetic template. By placing flower petals (sometimes with their leaves) in water, we can benefit from the healing properties of that particular flower as the lifeforce or energetic template of it is transferred to the water. (This water when combined with brandy becomes the mother tincture from which solution bottles are made. Solution bottles are a combination of the mother tincture, brandy and spring water.)

For a few years, the timing wasn’t right for making the Golden Chain Tree flower essence for various reasons, either for the Golden Chain Tree or in terms of my energy. One needs to get permission from the deva of a particular flower or plant and be up early to harvest the flowers for a flower essence. And a sunny day is required in order for the petals to sit in water in the garden, infusing the water with its energy, for several hours. The Golden Chain tree just lasts for two weeks so the opportunity for harvesting can pass quickly.

Another issue is busyness – I’d like it to be calm when I make a flower essence, without too much going on around me. As it turns out, there is always busyness of some sort whether it’s a variety of birds chirping in the garden or people and cars on a nearby street. That seemed to let me know what the deva of the Golden Chain tree was telling me: find your own still centre in the midst of it all.

From my journal. May 16, 2018: It feels cooler this morning and it’s a bit overcast. The birds are happy, even the goldfish are exuberant in the pond. The neighbours may wonder what I’m doing out here, standing under the Golden Chain Tree, snipping a blossom and then sitting on a step to write some notes. A tiny spider lands on my notebook. Then a tiny green bug on my knuckle. It hops off and I have a sense of wonder about the magnificence of the Golden Chain Tree and the tiny creatures that dwell here.

Our cat Squeaker is with me. I’m surrounded by the trees I call my guides: the arbutus, and the Douglas firs: Constant, Stillness and Serendipity. The mountain I look to each morning is called te’tuxwtun, Grandmother of All Surrounding Mountains, to the Snuneymuxw people on whose traditional lands we live.

“Be curious” is one message that came through. Also, appreciate the small in the midst of the magnificent. A neighbour was leaving on a trip, Sarah was leaving for work and soon after I settled down to write my notes, the mail carrier came to the door with a letter to be signed for. She and I talked about the two neighbourhood cats she feeds as she says they’re always very hungry. I said I’d feed them when she’s on vacation. “You would do that,” she asked. She got teary and surprised herself. “All creatures great and small” comes to mind, a Sunday School song I sung as a child.

Small things and small moments, we need to tend them all. A hummingbird is nearby, attracted to the red geraniums in a large pot.

A practitioner tunes into the deva of a particular flower, in this case, the Golden Chain Tree, to learn the definition. The definition that came to me which I honed over a number of days was:

“The Golden Chain Tree essence supports our own still centre in the midst of overwhelm and helps us appreciate the small in the midst of the magnificent. It encourages a sense of curiosity and wonder for the tiny creatures of the world, small things, and small moments. The Golden Chain Tree essence reminds us to tend them all. Small steps make up the whole. Small moments of attention, whether with a tiny creature, a project or a person, create a glorious and life-enhancing effect.”

A flower essence can be taken any time as they are not affected by coffee, alcohol, or food and may be used in combination with vitamins, herbs and homeopathics. Just a few drops directly in the mouth or in a glass of water can help balance the electrical system of the body. In an alchemical fashion, the essences co-ordinate with the cyclical nature of healing, growth and change.

If you’d like your own bottle of Spirit of the Island Golden Chain Tree flower essence, you can order it here.

I had been reading Kyo Maclear’s memoir, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation (Scribner, 2017) and appreciated what she had to say about “small” things including “small increments of writing time”: “Day after day I write my words at a small table in a small nook in a small cafe on a small street. On warm days, the doors are open. Sometimes house sparrows hop past or fly overhead. I don’t know when I began to prefer small things. Drawings of the small moment, nearly microscopic sculpture, compact stories, animated shorts, airy novellas, little gardens, economical studios, cozy dinner parties, small days of small demands that allow small increments of writing time.”

Lately I’ve been reading Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks (New World Library, 2018) and it’s so engaging. It ties right in with “in praise of the small” as Matthew talks about the five-second moments in a person’s life that bring clarity to a story. Mathew is an award-winning storyteller and while we may not get on stage to tell stories from our lives, we are sharing stories with others all the time. As Matthew says in the preface to his book: “In fact the simplest stories about the smallest moments in our lives are often the most compelling.” He’s talking about “true stories told by the people who lived them.” And he says when in comes to telling a story: “You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal.”

I’ve been thinking of those small moments in longer stories I’ve read. The personal essays included in the Globe & Mail as “First Person: (formerly “Facts & Arguments”) are examples. The essays have their readers learn or realize something. In this example, the writer finds a relationship with herself. Here’s the link to a recent essay, “I need to find a more satisfying way to live with MS.”

Even poems, have a discovery on the part of the narrator and therefore on the part of the reader.

Storytelling is not poetry Matthew says, but there are similarities in the crafting of each. For instance if there are too many people in the “true” story you’re telling, you eliminate a few people to simplify things. You compress the story into a day rather than describe the weeks something may have taken. Those are just a couple of examples that come to mind.

Rather than the big, look for the small Matthews advises. We’ll be doing that in a one-day women’s writing circle, In Praise of the Small, on Sunday, July 29th at my home in Nanaimo. You can find the details here:

Matthews Dicks says: “Good stories are about singular moments in our lives. Moments of realization or transformation. I call them ‘5 second moments’ because that’s about how much time it takes for them to happen. They are the moments you fall in love. Fall out of love. Discover something about yourself or the world around you. Change your minds on something important. Learn something new that changes your perspective forever. It’s the moment you realize that your mother has been right for your entire life.”

To close, here’s a beautiful poem by the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz about a moment in time. This is a poem my poet friend Richard Osler included in one of his blogs on “the bigness of small poems.”

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.