out along a countryside lane with a botanist friend, i was delighted to be introduced to someone i've seen many times hanging onto the stone walls and poking out to say hello, though i'm not usually a fan of labelling, rather it's the last thing i think reveals something about someone (if we meet and we tell each other our names, we certainly don't then abruptly turn and walk away as if we know all there is to know about each other).
indeed, it seems that the need to bark out & puzzle over names while walking around in nature, calling out the words "that's a ...." and give labels to animals, flowers, plants, trees, can simply shut down the curiosity, inquiry, and our natural delight and sense of desire for contact and listening. much like we do whenever we quick, shallow, banal exchanges of job, city, and mechanical questions for real conversation with someone we just met, so that this person becomes almost interchangeable with the other people in x, y, or z category we've already experienced or set up in advance, substituting the possibility that the present moment offers to have a unique, opening-of-all-our-senses encounter.
yet i have also very rarely seen that, like adam naming each creature in the garden of eden, sometimes this naming is an act of relating. yes, at such times the power of a name is quite the opposite of a shutting down & moving on through a label, and more like a discovering that a really fascinating and beautiful man is named jean luc, for example, (complete with french accent of course). yes, i admit, that would kind of open me up to want to know more and make me fall more in love with the person, in the moment (okay, and it in fact did, and amplified his beauty).
so it is that on our walk, with this plant clinging to the stone walls alongside our shoulders, let's say the jean luc effect took hold, for my botanist friend told me that this plant's name is "l'ombelico di venere"...the navel of venus. it provoked from me a wow! reaction.
venus: goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality all connected together, her greek name aphrodite, whose nudity for the ancients was a symbol not of lust or scandalous nakedness, but of the body that was spiritual and sacred as well as sensual.
hearing its name just made me want to poke this little green plant in its central indentation, it being so like a belly button...so i did, gently.
and now for me, it seems that this new umbilicus friend of mine will be a constant reminder of the platonic ideas of love that led the medici family here in florence to ask boticelli to paint the now-iconic birth of venus that hangs here in the uffizzi: the birthday party of the goddess of love, an image of the birth of love itself.
because love, according to plato, is the structure behind all that exists. it's the bones on which everything hangs. and so, these little green centers of life make it feel like love, goddess, is being born all over the place all the time!
