Primroses
“Nature is ever
singing to a child a more exquisite song, and telling a more wonderful tale.” —William
Wordsworth
Sonja, our neighbor, came by the other day and saw
me planting flowers. “Must be spring,” she said, “the Ropers are planting primroses.”
Primroses
are inseparable from the season in our minds as well: They are harbingers of
spring. But more than that, they’re “joyous, inarticulate children come with
vague messages from the Father of all.”[1]
Ask
a botanist, “What is a primrose,” and he will call it primula, the Latin word for “earliest.” He
will dissect it and show us its parts and kill it by analysis. A primrose is a
primrose is a primrose. Nothing more.
Ask a poet, “What is a primrose?”
and he will answer: “Love’s truest language,” Here is a region far deeper than
the findings of science, one known mainly to prophets, poets and little
children and much closer to the truth of things. Who but loving father could
think of flowers for his children?
“The appearances of nature are the truths of
nature,” George MacDonald said, “far deeper than any scientific discoveries in
and concerning them... Their show is the face of far deeper things than they;
we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the
unseen…What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered
of them.”
Flowers
and other beautiful created things are the “face of far deeper things than they...”
Look deep enough and you will see the face of our Father.
My,
how loving he must be!
DHR
