Each year in August, the yellow daffodils burst from the ground of the garden bed near my front door and the gate to my parents’ front door, signify to me that seasonal renewal is occurring, and that school holidays are coming!
While my own and my parents’ daffodils came from our local Bunnings, some have gone so far as to suggest these flowers first came to Australia via the Emperor of Rome who brought them to Britain in 43 AD. These Roman troops carried daffodil bulbs and then scattered them at the places where Roman troops had fallen in battle. The flowers came to be seen as an annual springtime tribute to those who were lost. Many centuries later, English farmers and then colonial settlers started growing daffodils for sale at flower markets.
Christian communities in Europe and North Africa came to view flowering daffodils as a visual reminder of the Latin expression viriditas, the greening power of all creation. Nearly a thousand years ago in Germany, a Benedictine nun and Doctor of the Church, Hildegard of Bingen, wrote that we should all stop and observe the power of plants who put forth leaves and fruit to be reminded of the potential within humans to grow in understanding and heal past hurts. For Hildegard, spring flowers and the seasonal greening of our environment are pointers back to the divine, to God our creator, or in her words to our ‘life force’ which sustains the universe and every living being. While viriditas can be readily observed, it is easily threatened by human choices that impact the natural world and damage our interactions with living things.
For Hildegard, the beauty of creation should invite humans who are created by God in God’s own image to consistently renew their mind and attitudes in order to care for all of creation not to destroy it.
Photos by Middle School parent and florist Petrina Burrill
In whatever change to normal routines you might experience in the coming weeks, hopefully you will find time to appreciate the wonders of springtime and, as the poet William Wordsworth put it in 1802 following the loss of a family member, to learn again to be renewed by nature and despite the challenges of our world learn to dance with the daffodils.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
that floats on high o'er vales and hills.
when all at once I saw a crowd,
a host, of golden daffodils;
beside the lake, beneath the trees,
fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
they stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a youth:
ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance
the waves beside them danced, but they
out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
a poet could not but be happy
in such a jocund company;
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:
for oft, when on my couch I lie
in vacant or in pensive mood,
they flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude;
and then my heart with pleasure fills,
and dances with the daffodils.
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, William Wordsworth, 1802.
Please feel free to email any member of the chaplaincy team over the holidays if we can be of any assistance.
God bless, take care and talk soon
Revd Scott Bramley
Middle School Chaplain
