I have a grandmother lavender in my back yard.
I call her that even though I am the one who planted her about twelve years ago, and so she is much younger than I in physical years.
The life span of lavender is about fifteen years, and for some that are well tended, twenty. So for her species she is old, a bit wizened and twisted with some deeper cracks that are beginning to show in her toughened bark.
She sits in a raised bed at the bottom of my deck stairs, her form bent by age and weather, she leans forwards and her summer skirts billow onto the pathway.
I’m supposed to harvest her blossoms just as the first flowers begin to open. That is the time when their shape can be frozen in time, her scent at the height of its perfumery, when everything can be best preserved, as each season she relives her youth.
But I never do.
How can I? She is just at the beginning.
As she opens each tiny purple petal to the sun she calls to the pollinators who flock to her in celebration. European Honeybees hum their appreciation moving to efficiently gather pollen in communal dance. Bumblebees add their base note vibration, showing off their harvest proudly in sticky orange pollen pods that cling to their hind legs.
And I am allowed to sit beside her and them and be welcomed. I never trim her glorious expansion until the last bees of fall have disappeared, and only then to let her contract and gather her strength for winter.
For she is everything.
She is young and old, nourishment and pleasure, and her medicine is in more than the essential oil she can offer.
I sit beside her and feel the calm of her wisdom. I lean into her cycles as she reliably opens and shares and holds all those who come near. And as the bees come to rest, and gather in her skirts, I feel gathered too… a kinship with her and them that is harder and harder to find in my own world. That we are here, together, dancing slowly in the rhythm of all things. We are perfect.