This is the Sea Daffodil; of all Andalusia’s flowers she is surely one of the most beautiful and spectacular.
–––
For the next three months, she will grace the sand dunes that form the backdrop to the wild beaches of this place.
In ancient Greece, this was one of the flowers of that Goddess of the plants, Persephone.
Its bulb lies three feet down in the pure sand, enabling it to find water in this most dessicated of landscapes.
For those legendary Greeks, this plant symbolized the journey of life, rising up from the underworld, then the all too brief flowering of great beauty and finally the return across the Styx into Hades once life has passed.
Right now though, she is in the fullness of her living, reaching up in gratitude towards the rays of the life giving sun.
All around me are the cycles of life and death, the hoops within hoops all set within the great wheel itself.
So I sit here like a latter day Dioscorides witnessing the flow of the great ecology and enjoying this all too short flowering of life.
Photos courtesy of the author.