BACKSTORY TO THE TRILLIUM AUDIO BELOW:
In May, the joyful trillium take over the hardwood forests of northern Michigan, preferring the shade of craggy stumps and fallen logs to the bright heat of direct sunlight. And if you chance upon just such a woods at the edge of a mighty lake when the sun is slowly sinking in the west, then you will find yourself in the shadows of the flowers, which is one of happiest places in all the world! What’s more, if you have respected another by honoring the vow to keep a secret, then the flowers can reveal to you the true mystery of their shadows, which is that they aren’t really shadows at all, for who can ever imagine such a thing as the shadow of a flower?
It was late in May, about an hour before sunset, that I walked out with a lovely secret still in my heart, and though I had intended to descend the 172 steps down the bluff to photograph Lake Michigan’s shore in the evening light, I stayed up, and walked along the narrow roadway instead, where I witnessed this mystery of secret and shadow, sunlight and flower, as though it were a thing I was thinking to myself, for my own amusement, though such things are never solo journeys when you are in the company of a vast wilderness. This is the nature of encounter with those things not bound to reason and logic, they appear as though they are our own imaginings, when really, they are the sacred whisperings of greater things. Many are the times when, from this other way of knowing the world, wisdom comes for the way forward in an otherwise puzzling world. And so, this secret that I found in the shadow of a flower…