Pink Pagonia Orchid. Happy Sunday!

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

The Pink Pagonia Orchid grows in bogs and very wet meadows in Southern Maine. These are from the carefully preserved remnant bog at Laudholm Farms in Wells, Maine (Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve). I go looking for them every late June into early July. A truly lovely orchid, and all the better for growing completely wild. There were only a few open yet this past week. I expect more by the first of July. 

There is a well known Robert Frost poem about the Pink Pagonia (which you might want to google), and it has inspired at least 2 of my Day Poems over the past few years. I admire its pinkness, of course, and the filly tongue, which contrasts so sharply with the smooth shell-like upper pedals. There is also a certain boldness in the way the flower thrusts forward from the stem...challenging the world with its beauty. 

It is purely a wildflower. I don’t think it can be cultivated, though I can image people have tried. It is one of God’s wild beauties, growing in what we would consider “waste” ground...too wet to plow...too wet even for livestock...and certainly too wet to build on. And yet it is there, spring after spring, brighting the bogs. I have to believe that my pleasure in the orchid reflects God’s own pleasure in creation. I have to believe that the pleasure I feel is an extension of God’s pleasure in the Pink Pagonia, transmitted through the spirit God shares with us, God’s children. I also have to believe that the Pink Pagonia, blooming above its bog, is enough to open the generous eye in almost anyone who sees it. How can the human spirit not respond to the Pink Pagonia? It would take a stingy eye indeed to be unmoved. 

So, to me the Pink Pagonia is as refreshing as a drink of spring water...spring water in the spring...and I hope it refreshes you spirit today, and opens your generous eye. Happy Sunday.