Amaranth
Love Lies Bleeding
Amaranth Wild in the City
Someone I met in the fall and didn’t talk to again until spring, surprised me with an invite to be part of the community's annual planting of Amaranth. She had a clay pot of seeds from years gone by. There was a ceremony involved and she asked me to light my candle and make my intentions and speak to the seeds. I knew then that she was a kindred spirit. Someone who reveres the ancestors and who upholds tradition and practices manifestation for the good of the community.
Amaranth is a wild food and is harvested for its grain, leaves, and shoots. Most popular for its seeds and can be enjoyed in a variety of ways. Some of my favorite suggestions are crackers, chips, and popped like popcorn! This plant is not one I have ever worked with and I am excited to follow through this year’s growing cycle to see what offerings come from her. There are others in the community who are part of the annual Amaranth harvest celebration in the fall. I am looking forward to meeting them and learning any wisdom they would like to pass on about this beautiful, tall, green and magenta, flowering plant. I can’t wait to hear the stories of their experience with Amaranth in their lives.
What I am also excited for, is to create a flower essence with Amaranth flowers. I wonder if it would be best by sun, or moon? Maybe there will be no difference at all. I am going to make a batch of each to find out what she has to say in either instance. My process will include sitting with the plants at night and in the day through the summer. Listening for messages and enjoying kind conversation.
A common name for Amaranth is Love Lies Bleeding. The flower essence of LLB brings transcendence beyond pain and suffering. Often in connection with physical pain or symptoms of disease and isolation. It helps one who is experiencing pain to expand beyond it and find the lesson or revelation it may possess. LLB offers a bit of detachment and offers you a view of it from outside yourself. Leading you to consider, what could this experience mean for me? What could it mean for humanity? How can I glean wisdom from this situation, or embrace compassion, and love for another through it?
LLB does not serve as relief or palliative care for anguish, but draws you further into it by bringing your awareness to how the pain moves, what it does, and how it thinks so that you can understand it and begin to see how to heal. This essence offers you a different view of pain and suffering. It reveals its reason for being and clarity on how to transmute it to a healing energy rather than a debilitative one.
Work with this flower for assistance in surrendering when the time calls for it, when you can take no more, in order to move into spiritual transcendence that comes with moving through pain. To bring you to the recognition that you are not identified by it. You have been presented with a human experience that requires contemplation and examination. Perhaps for the greater good of the collective or for your personal life.
The surrender to suffering brings you to your knees at the feet of love. LLB assists you towards this shift in energy where you become stronger in letting go, then in holding on tightly. You turn to a sense of love, curiosity, and self-nurturance and away from suffering, fear, and isolation. Compassion and empathy reign.
The plant bleeds out in beautiful crimson ropes that not only feed our hearts and souls, but nourish our bodies. Amaranth grows so easily, quickly, and with such vigor! I feel fortunate to be surrounded by it in my town. She is a cultural icon and once you’ve met her, you see her everywhere here. I will be doing a deeper dive throughout the summer and will be back with a follow-up entry to tell you more during harvest in the fall!
For now, let us find space and strength for surrender, so as to be opened by love for ourselves and one another. Approach your soul’s center to reach for the tender fruit of vulnerability. Let your love lie bleeding.
From My Tender Heart to Yours,
Violet
