This is me, telling this story, along with the painting I managed to do with the very expert help of Jenny Herrick. I told the story at Voca Femina Live last Friday night. Such a beautiful evening. (More pictures to come)
Forget Me Not
I was just a kid in the late sixties, when the hippies proclaimed that flower power was going to heal the world. So even though I was only in the sixth grade, I did my part by embroidering some flower power on my bell-bottomed jeans – five petals with a stem and leaves.
After that, the 5 petaled flower became my signature. Every letter to a friend, every note I passed in Social Studies, every notebook I labeled with my name, all bore the signature of the 5 petaled flower, right next to my name.
I grew up Phyllis Hanna, at the edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota, right alongside granite spires, sweet-smelling pines, deep wooded lakes and clear shallow streams.
Growing up as I did in a large family, it was easy to get lost in the shuffle, and I made it my business to be the one nobody had to worry about, and I ended up becoming the one nobody seemed to see.
The August after high school graduation, after the motorcycle rally and before we split up to go to college – just about this time of year – a few friends and I packed whatever gear we had and headed for the hills to camp for a week. My friend Brenda had spent her summer at a work camp in the Hills, so she knew just the place. Hanna campground. I was stunned. That was my name – Hanna. Who knew they named a campground after me?
It was a glorious week, hiking through the mountains, weaving daisy chains, showering in Roughlock Falls, and talking late into the nights by the fire. One morning I went off by myself to put my feet in the stream. As I was sitting there I noticed thin stalks covered with tiny blue flowers, growing right at the edge of the bank where I was sitting. I looked closer.
Five petals of sky blue, the whole flower less than a centimeter in diameter, with an orange-yellow dot in the center. It looked like a miniscule sun in the middle of a tiny blue sky.
Have you ever had a moment when time seems to stand still? When the whole world holds its breath and suddenly you find yourself in that thin space between heaven and earth?
This was my flower. The flower I saw in my mind when I so lovingly embroidered it on my favorite jeans. The flower I saw in my mind when I fastened it to my signature. My signature flower, here in the real.
I felt this flower was sent here just for me. A little piece of loveliness I’d always longed for, waiting here at the edge of nowhere, just for me to find.
And although I know it grows in many parts of the world, I’ve never seen it anywhere but in the clear cold streams of my home.
Since that week I’ve often made my pilgrimage to that obscure part of the world. One summer, in search of my little blue flowers, I found them a few miles up from Hanna campground, growing in a shallow stream that meandered through the meadow next to the road. As we followed the road I noticed they’d taken over the entire stream, so that, instead of the water, all I could see was a ribbon of blue, made of millions of my tiny flowers, winding its way before us.
It wasn’t until recently I learned the name of the flower – forget me not.
This last month we made another pilgrimage to visit my little blue flowers. The Hills were more beautiful than I’d ever seen them. Not the purple mountains’ majesty kind of beauty we live in the midst of here in Colorado, but the kind of beauty that can wrap me up like a blanket and sing me a lullaby.
I felt the thin spaces again.
And as I held my little flowers in my hand, contemplating their delicate beauty, I knew these things:
- there is a place in the world where the earth knows my name
- the sweet-smelling pines and the clear mountain streams stitch the foundation of my body and soul
and most importantly,
- in the smallest places of my deepest heart, I am not forgotten.
