In her poem “Slow Down Now,” she leads us through this process, moving from objective observation of herself and environment to a more and more subjective stance. We can literally watch the image of the plant being absorbed into her:

The last line arrives abruptly and yet not artificially. It has grown organically out of the images before. We can follow it back. Traditional beauty is what has initially caught the poet’s attention, the “glorious cloud” that is the flower head gone to seed. It is dying back. But because she is in what Corbin would call “sympathy” with the plant, honing her attention, her breath calms, her body calms and she is suddenly not “feeling time at all.” The flower has enabled a shift in consciousness. She is in plant time, so much so that she can see the plant with her eyes closed.

If there is an equivalent in human beings to flowering, perhaps it is in the way feeling overtakes us.

In the center of her sight — one wonders whether she means the center of her closed eye or being — an effusion, much like a blossom, is pouring forth. Is this unrestrained expression flowing from the plant or has it set something in motion inside her, a feeling that takes the image of the bud opening and then the incredible transformation into seed? “Compared with the leaf, the flower is a dying organ,” writes J. Lehrs, quoted in The Secret Life of Plants. “This dying, however, is a kind we may aptly call a ‘dying into being.’ Life in its mere vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place… In the human being it is responsible for the metamorphosis or organic process which occurs in the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondition for the appearance of consciousness within the organism.”^[27] Looking at the flower gone to seed, Berssenbrugge suddenly accepts her own aging and with it her grief for her friends, as if the flowering has made room for this acceptance. It is a new-found awareness she has grown into.

If there is an equivalent in human beings to flowering, perhaps it is in the way feeling overtakes us. I’m not sure what I mean by this, but when Berssenbrugge writes, in another poem, “There is an affinity between awareness and blossom,”^[28] I read “awareness” not as a way of thinking but as a feeling, feeling not as an emotion but as a tool, a trans-sensory tool, that introduces us to a different way of perceiving. Flowers are capable of this kind of feeling; they surface and bloom. (Perhaps that is why they are so associated with the female, granted as women are with that permission.) Radiance flowers, as do ideas, love, and epiphanies in the body and in the mind. The flower as verb. Communication flowers, between people as well as between humans and plants, as in this last section from the aforementioned poem, “Slow Down Now”: