Goldenrod and the goddess Venus

Goldenrod comes late in the season, when the other flowers have started to fade. She is the unexpected plot twist, the reminder to leave room for the miracle. We don’t always know how things will unfold, despite the look of things, despite what the mind says.

She appears in my region when the geese are beginning to make their loud calls, announcing the shift in season, and their pending departure. Suddenly everywhere in bursts, the brightest yellow solar reflection in the form of goldenrod covers the landscape. I almost want to say “how?” at the surprise of it. I’ve spent a lot of time with that question this year, with tears in my eyes, at the truth that we are in fact witnessed, attended too, cared for, and reflected back to ourselves by the natural world, far beyond what we might understand.

Goldenrod is associated with the goddess Venus. This plant vibrates with the message that love and beauty are the frequency of the natural world. That we as humans are a part of the natural world, and encompassed in this experience.  If we get out of the way, we can watch it move through our lives as it does in nature and upend our ideas of how things should be.

Nature has its own timing and so do we. The late bloomers are all the more radiant because they have taken their time, and harnessed their power, when they burst on the scene we don’t see them coming, and their radiance resonates with our sense of hope.

Hope never goes anywhere, it is innate in us. We can push it down, try to settle, contort ourselves around ideas of safety, but our longing for the magical and miraculous still exists. It remains because that is intended to be part of the experience of being divinely human. Goldenrod holds the signature of this and she reminds us, if we have started to forget.

Working with goldenrod strengthens our clairsentience and reinforces the truth of our multi sensory experience. For many women this is natural and embodied, and has remained encoded within us despite a culture that suggests it is not so. Goldenrod and the goddess Venus can activate this remembrance within us.