The True Nature of Flowers, Stars, and the Self

Especially at the beginning of my tattoo journey, there were moments when I wondered if I actually even liked drawing (or tattooing, for that matter), floral pieces at all. Was it just imagery so common in the tattoo world that I had simply adopted it for myself? Or did I actually find beauty, joy, inspiration, and a true muse through the gifts of mother nature?

Throughout so many of my botanical flash series, I have always combined these motifs with stars—to me, it makes an absolute perfect sense. A sense that reveals the magic and wonder of these fascinating plants, showing an even deeper intrinsic nature of Earth itself: an ancient, cosmic origin. A natural divinity. A nature that can only blossom from the perfect conditions of the sun and stars, can only grow to its full potential bloom with the perfect harmony of water, air, and sun.

Earlier this past autumn, I learned that botanists consider a flower perfect if it has both male and female reproductive parts. This fact hit like a lightning bolt—a realization that completed a philosophy in my mind that I had not even known was brewing secretly all this time: that to realize our true perfect nature, we cannot hold onto extremes of any kind—that the integration and balance of our miraculous masculine and feminine selves is a necessity that often goes overlooked. Just writing this brings to mind the androgynous nature that so many depictions of deities, bodhisattvas, and buddhas hold—in the grand scheme of things, the definition of "him" and "her" become impertinent and interchangeable, because over time, we realize that in fact, there really is only "one."

And then from "one," there is nothing at all.

Nothing, because just like the flowers, trees, and plants that grow all around, there really is no discernible self. That indeed, when we magnify our observation of reality, in this flower, we see its leaves, its petals, we see its cells. Then we begin to see the air, water, the sun…

And so it is, as we look inward, we may find all the qualities of the cosmos within us as well.

How beautiful, no? How profound! When we realize that even the self is not something worth clinging and holding onto, we can begin to notice how much of others really is already within us—our mother's hair, our father's dimple. Our mannerisms of our ancestors, our jokes and laughter of our friends. The barista you get your coffee from. The stranger you bump into on the street. The cat that scampers away, the flower that sways in the breeze, the clouds that move along steadily in the sky. All of it is within us, all can be connected back to us.

All of it, perhaps, is us.

And so, the answer is: yes. Yes, I do indeed, truly, absolutely love tattooing, drawing, gazing upon, whispering to, flowers and plants and buds alike. I love hearing what they have to say, and I love listening deeply to the wisdom of the universe that they impart.

The Buddha told us that we only need to observe our direct reality to find the unwavering truth of the Dharma, the teaching, all around us. As I look closely every day, moment to moment, even ever more, I find indeed how powerful and pervasive the Dharma is. It is never-ending, living and thriving—all the time, constantly. And if we can simply take a moment—a beautiful, slow, quiet moment—to breathe and sit, we have complete and total access to see and feel such joyous, peaceful interconnectedness within us. Always.

All we have to do is look.