A Fig is a Flower That Hasn't Opened

Welcome to my first read aloud! I couldn’t bear not sharing this with all of you. I hope you enjoy listening along.

Dear Wanderer,

I don’t know why it always amazes me when the flowers start to open and the world begins to turn green again at the end of winter. While my rational mind knows the calendar date, has seen 37 winters become 37 springs, there’s another part of me that gets so hungry for leaves and flowers that I almost can’t believe it will happen until it does.

Each new blossom is like a stepping stone, getting me to the next one until winter has eased. First come snow drops and crocuses, fruit trees blooming in succession, then magnolias becoming cathedrals in the park and petals giving way to leaves. And now, at midsummer, the tiniest fruits have swollen and the raspberries have already gone. There are late-bloomers and early apples, something ready for harvest all the way through the fall. From now on, as summer heat presses down, each ripening, each cloudy morning, will mean the promise of cooler days, until the winter returns and we do it all again.

I learned recently that the succession of blooms provides what is called the “nectar flow,” the opening flowers making a literal pathway of sustenance through the year for our pollinators. It’s the early bloomers that get them through the winter. For birds flying south in the fall, it’s the late fruits and berries that provide food for their long journeys. Every single plant, blooming and fruiting in its own time, has a role to play in the flow of nourishment on which we all depend.

I don’t live off of nectar and wild berries (entirely), but I am nourished by them all the same—by their beauty. I am so conscious of the world’s beauty, so fed by it and dependant on it, that I sometimes feel self-conscious. I’m learning to look for signs of pests and disease in plants, but they were hard for me to see at first, because I am so taken with the beauty of the world. This comes, I’ve heard, with the territory of having my Venus in the sign of Leo, right on my Ascendant: I hunger for beauty and I see it everywhere. I am entranced by it, to a fault.

I wish I knew what my ancestors called the planets. Like the plants, they wear the Latin names of empire. However, I am comforted to learn, from Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, that some constellations have the same name all over the world. Orion is a hunter in every language. Maybe Venus was the planet of beauty for some of my ancestors too.

At the time of my birth, Venus, along with Mercury and the Moon, were all in the part of the sky called Leo, which was also the constellation rising on the horizon. The lion in me is super emphasized, which is something I’ve always felt embarassed about. Leos are known for being loud, self-centered and dramatic, and for wanting to be the center of attention all the time. I could see Leo being a lion in every language too. Growing up, I wasn’t encouraged to act the part of the lion. When I was too loud, too selfish or too needy, it was made clear to me that I was doing something shameful. Taking too much. Being too much.

So I got quieter. Asked for less than I wanted. Disowned the bigness of my personality, my desires and my voice.

It nearly killed me.

Over-work, under-nourishment and habitual self-betrayal are the things I learned I had to do to get by. I had no boundaries for my own time and energy, and I spent myself to survive. My body and mind crashed and burned, and I was forced to spend the pandemic years (it’s still the pandemic years) in various stages of recovery, going through portal after portal of grief and healing, which, I’m learning, is a cycle without end for any clear-eyed soul these days, but not a joyless one.

Now I’m back to the beginning, learning the limits of my mind and body like a child, while my peers have built careers and homes and communities.

And it’s wonderful!

I am so alive to myself, and to the world of gifts constantly unfolding. There is so much to learn, and so much potential. In a time when there’s so much to grieve—for myself and for my children—I’m learning to give my own gifts, formed in no small part by the things I don’t have, and am still learning.

And I, too, am part of the nectar flow.

I am a stop along the way for friends on long journeys. I am life, amplified, so that others can see it and find their way. This is the gift of Venus in Leo. It takes courage to live hard and loud, and Leo has courage in spades. It’s the sign of the heart, afterall.

We are half way through a Venus retrograde, which is happening entirely in Leo. Turned any blind corners in it yet, Wanderer? I have. We tend think of retrogrades as planets in the negative, times when everything that can go wrong, will, and it’s true that retrogrades can force us to navigate with a compass that has nothing to do with externally-imposed ideas of order, but I would prefer to think of them as times of deepening inward and meeting our secret selves. Retrogrades are times for hidden beauty, when the energies that surround us ask us to go deep with them, and in exchange, if we let them, they give us back a part of ourselves.

This Venus retrograde places extra emphasis on the Self in relation. In Leo, the heart won’t hide. No matter how we may try to foist the focus onto others, we will always be called back to attend to ourselves. “To save the only life [we can] save,” as Mary Oliver says.

We will truly be the most loving when we are the most ourselves. Can we stand in the circle of ourselves and act in relation to others from conscious choice, instead of compulsion or habit or fear? Can we learn the ways of our own self-betrayal and refuse them, even when it means betraying the expectations of others? Can we love our own beauty at all costs?

Our own beauty is not separate from the beauty of the roses and the figs. I used to think that loving my own beauty would be a selfish, self-absorbed thing to do, but when I really do it I find the line between Self and Other dissolves, and there is just. . . beauty.

At this point in the harvest, the figs are ripening, for the second time. Figs give two crops every year, which makes them unique among fruits. I love figs because they blur the line between fruit and flower. For figs, the flowering happens inside, and the fruit is the unopened flower. Because they blosson inward, they’re the perfect fruit for a Venus retrograde.

“There was a flower that blossomed inward, womb-ward; now there is a fruit like a ripe womb,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in his famous poem “Figs.”

I kind of hate that poem.

“It’s always a secret,” he continues, “That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.”

Venus in Leo begs to differ.

Actually, she doesn’t beg at all.

Venus in Leo, with her child-like love of beauty, shows us her deep truth in retrograde: that loving beauty takes deep courage. That seeing the beauty in the things we fear the most is how we heal them. That the parts of us that we think should be kept secret are the parts we need—and the world needs us—to show the most.

Leo, then, is about courage, not selfishness.

I don’t believe in canceling literature that fails. This, to me, just flattens the narrative and we lose out on opportunities to learn and test ourselves. As Paisley Rekdal writes in her book Appropriate: A Provocation, “I do not have to learn any valid literary technique or way of living from [offensive] texts, but I do have to learn how to stand up against them. I have to learn how to confront language that distresses me and not feel my world crumble but solidify in response to it.” A very Leonine task, to confront distress and solidify in response to it.

Even before I could say why, I’ve always felt confused and offended by Lawrence’s aesthetically lovely poem. He uses language evokative of female genitalia—exposes it—and in the same breath states that the owners of this genitalia should keep it hidden. This is a kind of violence, like saying, “I can do this to you but when you choose it it’s wrong.” But also, I hate his assertion that a burst fig is a ruined fig—a visible female is a ruined female. Or rather, that being “ruined” in the eyes of others means an end to possibility. To wit:

“That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the
purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her
secret.
That's how women die too.”

I have faced ruin, so let me tell you what happens after: you become food for someone else. You share. Your life force, all your stored nutrients, flow outward so that life can continue. You become something new, something with the capacity to metabolize all your ruin, and life continues.

Now let me tell you what doesn’t happen after: you don’t die. That is not how women die. They die slowly, over time, from keeping themselves small, and hidden, and palatable. They die from keeping their secrets inside.

A fig is a flower that hasn’t opened. When it does, it splits and shows its fleshy, seedy, and obscenely juicy insides. For a fig, to bloom is to explode!

I think my endeavor to know the plants on not just a physical, but a spiritual level, is maybe because I’m trying to become a little less human, and a little more plant. A little fig, a little violet. I think radical unity, a radical sense of collective identity, is the antidote to the disease of separateness that has us all so on the brink of destruction all the time. But radical unity requires radical individuality too, the compassionate owning and intimate sharing of our messiest, fleshiest, fruitiest insides.

That takes courage. Lots of courage. And Venus in Leo has courage in spades.

So it’s the perfect time, Wanderer. Explode. Bloom late. Bloom strange. Bloom twice, or not at all. A fruit can be a flower, a flower can bloom inside out. Unlike Lawrence, figs don’t strike me as female but as exuberantly queer. They show us there are more ways and times to bloom, and fruit, and be, than the ones we expect of ourselves (and others). They show us the power of not doing, or over doing, or doing something very, very strange, simply because our fruit is our own.

Above all, they show us how much people love, and need, our messy insides.

Never think, Wanderer, that you are missing out, or doing it wrong. Never think that you are too much, or too little, or too late. You are part of the nectar flow, and one day, some weary traveler, some winter-starved wanderer, will be so, so grateful that you’re there.

Exploding,

Sasha