Flowering Around

The sun is out again today.  A walk is in order.  Maybe cleaning up the garden a bit.  Maybe reading my favorite nursery catalog.  Thinking about flowers, blooming trees, trees with bloomers.  Whatever.  It’s  fertile ground.

The part of the flower labeled stigma,  is the sticky end of the style that leads to the ovary.  The ovary holds the eggs like a flowery nest.

 Stigma can also mean a brand or a mark of shame which attaches to a person or place.  It’s that sticky bit that you cannot shake off.

In another form it was the mark of blessedness—the stigmata, a mark like that on Jesus’ palms.

Stigma/stigmata, disgrace/ grace.

Isn’t language a wonderful thing?

So this sticky bit of a flower, a generative half of reproduction (it does need to be pollinated), is the place where rebirth can occur.  The petals attract attention, but the stigma is the business.

Another part of the business is the anther. The anther, along with the filament is called a stamen (Pliny),  and literally means “thread of the warp” in the upright loom.

The warp thread is the thread that is strung over the loom vertically, and holds the tension while you weave. The weft thread is the thread that you weave between the warp threads, creating your patterns and structure in the weave.

Can’t you just see that DNA molecule being formed?

You see where I’m going…the male part holds the tension, and the female creates the pattern.

Talk about recycling.  Language is constantly being repurposed.  You can see, you can almost hear, how one word became one thing and then another thing and then with a little tweaking became something else entirely.  But it all holds–its a complex matrix of interconnectedness that reflects how we see and feel and hear our world.  Oh it’s grand.

You start with flowers, segue into weaving and voila into sex.