This interior world varies person to person, moment by moment, because it is a process, not a product. In other words, it is creative. The mystery of any true image, regardless of whether it is flower or not, is that its meaning is not stable, but fluctuates. “Unchanging knowledge is unchanging ignorance,” Adonis says, quoting the Sufi master al-Niffari.^[43] The transitory and fugitive beauty of a flower is particularly suited as symbol of this fluctuation. What makes an image capable of engaging our active, not passive, imagination, Corbin says, is that a symbol “is never ‘explained’ once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again.”^[44] We never tire of flowers. We never tire of great poems or paintings because they bring something new to us each time we encounter them, news which is created in the act of perception itself. The knowledge we glean from this act is new because it is created anew, in the moment of interchange between perceived and preceptor. Unlike allegory, wherein the image is interpreted within an agreed upon frame, this way of seeing posits an expanding not limiting view of perception, a chemical or, should we say, alchemical exchange.

“When a plant receives this kind of communication, it begins altering the wavelengths its chemicals reflect in order to offer itself to your imaginal sight, for you to gather it,” we remember reading in Berssenbrugge’s poem. She finishes her poem with these two stanzas:

Color, fragrance, “an infusion of its petals” travel from one body into another body, via the senses, and chemically alter that body, changing it from within, what we might describe as the physics of perception. The flower image centers us, and, if we are practicing a particular kind of creative imagination, centers inside us. We can feel that kind of center inside our own bodies, perhaps in our own minds, the way focus begins and then grows exponentially out. Growth as a kind of petalling. Consciousness as a flower act. A dahlia. A spider mum. A rose. The movement back and forth between exterior image and interior one is what constitutes the visionary experience. Our “imaginal” or interior awareness of an image directly stimulates our psyche and we, in turn, urge more of the image to reveal itself, a perpetual movement toward shared meaning, what we might call the metaphysics of perception.

To see with one’s eyes closed is to see oneself as a place of apparition, to inhabit the geography of the imagination. The flower serves as a mandala, offering endless passageways into this geography…

The language of flowers, which is said to have originated in ancient Persia, and which devolved in Victorian England and Europe into a sentimental system of associations between specific plants and specific human feelings such as fidelity, sympathy, friendship, is, according to Corbin, a system of symbols that offered “unlimited possibilities to liturgical imagination as well as for rituals of meditation.” The flowers “evoke psychic reactions, which transmute the forms contemplated into energies corresponding to them,” he writes in his book Celestial Body, Spiritual Earth.^[46] The flower, in being seen, lights up or wakes up or enables us to see the flower in us, to see our own beauty, as it were, something we instinctively love. The form of the flower leads us to the experience of beauty, not the appreciation of it. It lures us, as it does the bee, into pollinating or quickening ourselves.

And where does this alchemy take place? If it is possible to speak of place when describing the processes of the imagination, it must be inside us. The Sufis located it in the heart, as Jalaluddin Rumi writes, in this translation by Corbin:

The image, which attracts us with its intimation of something more than us, flowers from the earth, like a rose but not a rose, something that takes form in order for us to see it. Like the penumbra of light around a tree at dusk, it is both tree and not tree. At the same time, it is “like” something rising inside us. Char says of the double roses, “I see them from the heart, for my eyes are closed.” Berssenbrugge writes, “Even with eyes closed, I see flowers in the center of my sight.” To see with one’s eyes closed is to see oneself as a place of apparition, to inhabit the geography of the imagination. The flower serves as a mandala, offering endless passageways into this geography, a land that cannot be mapped because it is endless, though we can be sure that there are meadows in the vast realms established there.