The Oldest Devotion

Rose, Inanna, and the Myrrhophores: The Ancient Sacred Feminine Medicine That Remembers What We Have Forgotten

My mother planted a rose bush beneath my bedroom window.

I do not remember when it arrived. The most essential things in a childhood rarely announce themselves with beginnings. They simply take their place in the landscape of your becoming, as steady and unquestioned as breath.

What I remember is the scent.

Warm evenings in spring and summer, the window open, the light going slowly out of the sky, and rose coming in on the air the way a presence enters a room.

Before sleep. Before dreams. Before thought could organise what was being felt into anything as small as meaning.

I grew up inside that scent.

I did not think of it as medicine or teaching or lineage.

I thought of it as home.

As a young woman, I loved yellow roses. Her colour held something of sunlight made tangible, something bright and unguarded, and I recognised myself in that brightness. My lovers brought me yellow roses and I received them the way you receive things when you are young and have not yet understood that a gift can also be a message from something older than the person giving it.

I thought I knew her.

And in the way that everyone thinks they know rose, I did. She is the most recognised flower on Earth. She has lived in our poems, our rituals, our thresholds of birth and grief and devotion for so long that we carry her imprint before we ever touch her. She moves through the blood as a symbol long before she ever roots herself in the garden.

But knowing the shape of something is not the same as knowing the thing.

The year I was truly called to her, rose made her intentions very clear.

She had been growing along the pergola outside the kitchen for years, flowering and returning with the patience of a wise and ancient being that measures time differently.

We lived beside, co-existed with one another, and I loved her in the way we love what feels familiar, without realising that familiarity is sometimes the veil that keeps us from seeing clearly.

Then one spring, she crossed the threshold.

Not metaphorically. In the most literal, physical sense. A long green cane, finding the smallest opening in the old patio door, pressing forward with a slow, unwavering intelligence, curling herself through wood and hinge as though she had been studying the structure for years, waiting for the precise moment when passage would become possible.

I stood there for a long time.

Because something in me recognised what the eyes were seeing.

This was intention made visible through form.

Rose, when she speaks, does not whisper. She simply arrives.

Fully.

In the doorway of your ordinary life and waits to see what you will do.

So I listened.

I walked to her every morning when the air still held the memory of night. I sat beside her in the evenings as the light lowered and gold moved across her petals. I brought her into the kitchen, into the hands, into the daily rhythm of living. I drank her in tea, in elixir, in the rose water I began to make in great slow batches on the stove in the copper alembic.

The whole year tasted of rose.

And something began to return. Not memory as we usually understand it. Not images or stories. Something deeper.

Something that moved through the tissues, through the quiet intelligence of the body, through a place that existed long before thought began organising experience into meaning.

It went all the way down to the bone.

To something below the bone.

A knowing that had been waiting inside me, sealed like a letter.

Rose had the key.

She has been waiting for this moment for years.

In my 13 Moon herbal calendar, every moon carries a plant ally. A plant that holds the medicine of that particular season, that particular sky. And this moon, the Bud Moon, belongs to Rose.

But the sky she is stepping into is unlike any other.

In tonight sky seven planets gathered in Aries. The Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Neptune, and Chiron. A stellium. A fire. The first New Moon of the astrological year, falling conjunct Chiron, the wounded healer.

And Beltane waits just ahead.

The old festival of the threshold, the moment when the year tips from spring into summer and the world between worlds grows thin. When the hawthorn opens her flowers and something ancient stirs in the green dark.

Here the land is already answering. The paths are white with blossom. Everything is opening at once, extravagant and unhurried, as if the Earth has decided that whatever is happening in the world above, below there is only this. Flower following flower following flower.

Rose is one of them.

And she has something to say.

I recorded her lineage for you. Four thousand years of women carrying her, passing her hand to hand, through temples and kitchens and caves and burning times and cottage gardens and wartime hedgerows, all the way to here.

Find somewhere quiet. Let your eyes close if they want to. And press play.