Reading with Violets
Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia)
Violets are my springtime obsession, and lucky me, because they are all over the place come May in Michigan. Their delicate, purple flowers shade themselves under heart-shaped leaves, and seem to pop up in every environment, including sidewalk cracks. While they’re delightful to sit with and admire, they are equally fun to harvest. I throw their dried leaves in teas, eat both flowers and leaves in salads, and pick handfuls of violets to soak in water overnight for drinking throughout my day. I strongly encourage everyone to eat more violets, and after reading with them yesterday, I am pleased to say they agree!
Likely due to their heart-shaped leaves and genuinely sweet demeanor, violets have long been considered an ally for our hearts. They lift our spirits and soften hearts weighed down with the heaviness of grief and anguish. I transplanted a half dozen violets to my dog Ollie’s grave earlier this spring, and despite the poor soil above him, I’m pleased to say they are thriving. They offer me sweet comfort when I sit there with my grief. Ugh, dogs. 💜💜💜
A reading with violets
violet’s Essence: The star
When all hope is lost, violets emerge, a harbinger of spring’s renewal, beauty beneath every footstep. Violets grow abundantly, reminding us with their mere presence of the infinite stars in the cosmos. When THE STAR arises for us, it is a card that invites us into wholeness, stripped bare of protections we designed to keep us safe and small. To access this healing, it’s integral for us to get grounded, and show our most vulnerable parts of ourselves, to ourselves, in total awe and humility. THE STAR always reminds me of the awe we feel when experiencing our self in relation to the vastness of the cosmos, to the enormity of spacetime, the reminder that our lives are the tiniest, most minuscule blip. And that blip - it’s us, it’s the beautiful, whole embodiment of our truest selves, once everything is stripped away, as we exist, in our beautiful entirety. From this place, our wildest dreams, the deepest desires that can help us heal our aching hearts, emerge. This is the essence of our friend violet.
Violet’s Medicine: The empress
When we feel deeply vulnerable, heavy-hearted, drowning in grief, what is more nurturing than the unconditional love of the archetypal mother? In this beautiful, painful life, many of us miss out on experiencing maternal love, but even if not from our own mothers, it remains available to us. Violets are here to remind us that our very nature makes us deserving of love, even at our most raw and exposed. Nothing we can do, no harms we might knowingly or unknowingly commit, remove the love that is our birthright. If we can experience this, know this in our bones, our entire being can shift. The societal conditioning that says we can only be loved if we are productive, good, and enough (and under capitalism nothing is ever enough, right?), all of that can be seen for what it is - a story - and the truth of our intrinsic lovability emerges. Thank you, violets.
How might we work with violets? knight of wands
This is how the cards routinely make me laugh. Violets are like, come on already! Pick me! The Knight of Wands is the horniest card in the deck, for certain, energetically and passionately taking action with their fiery, gorgeous being adorned with salamanders. Violets invite us to use them however we like - throw their flowers in your baths, candy them, adorn your heads and bodies, plaster them on cookies, bottle their essences, and if May’s long gone and they’re nowhere to be found, pull up a picture and do some…meditating. The unexpected appearance of this fiery knight in this position says to me that despite their sweetness, violets have a passion for life, and for working with us. Not only lifting our heavy hearts but reminding us that life is meant to be enjoyed, to be experienced, in this brief blip of a moment that we are lucky enough to be alive in, and with violets in the springtime.
Violet’s magic goes great with dandelion and redbuds, too.
