The Flower of Love

I have a new favorite flower. I had never really noticed it until this year, but I have been seeing it around San Francisco and had started to like it more and more. It's a flower with a very long stem and purple petals that are arranged like a burst.



Last weekend I went to Los Angeles, and I saw that flower EVERYWHERE. I started to feel an even stronger affinity for it, and every time I saw it, I had to smile. Incidentally I was casually looking for a new journal book to write in during my trip. I kind of expected that my new book would have a dragonfly or butterfly on it, but then I saw a purple and green one which I felt had a cartoonish version of this flower on it. I knew immediately that that was going to be my new journal.

Since the flower was definitely a theme over the weekend, I tried to find out more about it after I got back from my trip. Its official name is Agapanthus, which is Greek for 'love flower', and it is also known as African Lily or Lily of the Nile. According to one website, one of its spiritual effects is said to be stimulation of psychic abilities. That didn't surprise me at all. But then I found another website which had this to say:

Abundance consciousness; money issues; willingness to receive.

For avariciousness and poverty consciousness, an over-identification with possessions and the material dimension, for those who have money issues in their lives, hoarding what they have, feeling that there is never enough [...]. It is also for those who fear being deprived of physical resources. This essence allows abundance consciousness, an inner knowing that money is energy, that there is no limitation imposed from outside oneself, that one can have it all if one will open to receive it and that fear and avarice are a certain way to keep oneself in short supply.

I felt like that paragraph was specifically written for me right now because it talks about something I am really struggling with. I am scared shitless that I won't be able to support myself financially in my new calling as an intuitive counselor, and I am saving up as much money as I can before I make the big scary leap off the cliff, and am constantly trying to figure out how to make future ends meet. But now the african lily has come into my life to deliver a message. The message is that I shouldn't worry about that, and that there is an abundance of resources out there just waiting for me, and that the only thing standing in my way are my own fear and attachment.

Now that I am back in San Francisco, I continue to see that flower everywhere. It keeps appearing to remind me to let go of the worry. I even found some in the backyard behind my building! So this morning I decided to put one in the vase of my VW Beetle.