wildflowerwalker

Fringed Lily

Thysanotus tuberosus

Last December my nature buddy, Gigi (who has turned out to be my cousin but we didn’t know that back then and that’s a whole other story about the beauty of doing ancestral work!) and I decided to make a flower essence of the little Fringe Lily which was flowering at the time.

This is a summary of the teachings it shared with us along the way.

 

Intuition. Ability to see in the dark places, tap into collective.

The first lesson was in using and trusting our intuition and the ability to see beyond the surface, to see the invisible so to speak!

To start with we went out on an overcast day and could not find a single flower! There were a few layers to this, I’d not felt to go out that day but as we’d made an arrangement did it anyway. So a lesson in following and listening to intuition and not being swayed by others set the scene.

We searched high and low for the Fringed Lily, but couldn’t find a single one. We knew they were there as we’d been there a week before when they were all flowering. Finally we sat down and tuned into them instead. (The insights from this are spread through the rest of the article.) After connecting with the Lily in this way, we saw them everywhere! They were still closed (no flowers) but were now visible to us everywhere.

“When you look beyond the surface, I will open up to you and become visible.”

Fringed Lily helps you to see the invisible, see in the dark, to hone the intuition and support you to trust it. Fringed Lily is also for when we are not TRUSTING our knowing.

 

Sensitivity. Collective consciousness.

 There are a couple of signatures that pop out straight away for this theme.

• All of the flowers pop out at the same time and flower in unison. They are collective beings. In the water for the essence they all clung together and became one, their frayed edges linking together.
• Each flower of the Fringed Lily lasts only half a day, ours lasted until around 2pm before they all started to very slowly fold themselves up.  The Fringed Lily person is highly sensitive, and may not be able to be out and about for long periods as it fries their nervous system. Knowing our level of sensitivity and honouring how to care for ourselves as sensitive beings is part of her medicine.
• The frayed edges of the lily are another signature for this same theme (frayed nerves, the purple colour also). But more than this, they speak of an openness at the edges, an ability to connect into the collective, to merge with the external world.

This ability to tune into the collective is another way we can develop our intuitive skills.   The Lily can teach us how to open up at the edges and receive information from the collective, to connect and be fully present in order to receive.

On the other hand, she also teaches us about being visible and not merging and getting lost in the collective. Letting our true selves be seen, not a self that is doing what we think others want, but our real self. She helps us ground and stay connected to self as well as the collective (her root is a big bulbous one, she has large grounding capabilities too).

“Know what is YOU and what is not you, that is protective.”

She can be good for states in which you are feeling very vulnerable or where there is a fear of fully opening up.

Some years before this I made a flower essence of a Fringed Lily in Western Australia (Thysanotus multiflorus). After many hours tuning into her, the essence complete, I took some and she brought on this state (and so we can assume that she is very good for this state):

Feel highly sensitive. A feeling of being very needy and dependent, as if I may cry or keel over if not loved. All this on the inside, yet I feel strong and independent on the outside. Also an emptiness in the belly and a weakness – like a hysteria in the belly, nervous state that makes you weak, emotional and teary. Weak hysteria. Lily is good for this state.

 

Boundaries. Integrity

Lily is all about staying in your integrity, knowing your boundaries and limits and honouring that. Lily knows she is so open to the collective realm that she can only stay in that state for certain periods of time. She knows when her time is done and when to go to bed. We can learn from this!

While Lily is useful to help open us up more to connection, she is also incredibly useful for if we are too open – and can help make our boundaries healthy.

For those that lose their integrity when interacting with others (like Lily’s frayed edge on the boundary of her being). For those that don’t follow their truth, are easily swayed by others, who too easily give their integrity away when it comes to what others want, she can support you to stay solid in Self.

With both essences I’ve made, the Lily flowers did not submerge even after the hours spent on the water, like water off a ducks back, they appear to be waterproof. Lily has mastered the art of being in the collective (water) and not drowning. She can merge and yet still come out whole again, she may be transformed by the experience, but remains whole. She is so like water herself, she can join and merge with others and then separate off again like a droplet separating from the lake and then returning.

Lily is all about boundaries, the meeting place between the outside and the inside – the skin, the gastrointestinal tract, people and others, individual and the collective.

With much delight, the Fringed Lily deva shared with me the word pun of Lily being in villi and cilia and that she was very much connected to these other go betweens – the villi in the small intestine and the cilia in the body (another signature of her frayed edges). The villi create more surface area in the small intestine so that there is more capacity to receive. They also are the part of us that absorb nutrients. This relates to the same process of assimilating or making food (or information) into a part of us from the collective/external realm that it has come from.

She also had something to say about being a bridge between old and new ways. That it is important to make old ways your own (a lot like we make food our own through the villi of the small intestine) and the importance of not getting stuck in traditions that are no longer relevant. She was clear to state that we need to learn the traditions and make them our own before letting them go though!

There is also a lesson somewhere in here about the connection between the gut and the brain, but that’s for some deeper diving sometime.

 

Conscious choice. Discernment/Assimilation.

This is where we start to get to the real essence of Fringed Lily’s potency. We’ve already seen how she relates to the villi- the little organs of assimilation in the small intestine. Now we go deeper into this action of discernment and assimilation.

She shares:

Your body is a sense organ. With CONSCIOUS CHOICE you can engage it as this. If you don’t consciously engage and become aware of all the things you are feeling from the outside environment, you will become an oversensitive victim of impressions. I help you become aware that this is a CHOICE. You can choose to use this sensitivity, this gift, to engage it and to feel and fully engage in the world around you with full love and acceptance and compassion. This will relax you. This will protect you.

Or you can choose to stay unconscious of all the external impressions that your body is aware of at any moment. With this choice, you become a victim and may suffer from frayed edges when there is too much going on. You may feel frail and torn to shreds like the edges of my flower.

You have a choice with your sensitivity. When you engage in this conscious choice, you can also navigate when to feel and when to rest, when you’ve had enough and need to be alone. You can choose when to open and when to stay closed, you will know when it is safe to be open and when to stay closed.”

This is very similar to the gut villi that choose what to take in and absorb and what to let go of through the large intestine.

Wisdom of age.

Fringed Lily relates to the phase of old age moving towards death. She marks the passing where we begin to return to the collective after being an individual. She rules over the Crone/Sage phase of life.   Her purple flower is another signature for this, the colour of the more ethereal spirit realms.

“I will help you merge with the world gently. When it is time.”

In old age we are slowly moving towards the collective realms again, we gradually release the individuality, the ego parts, look back, let go, remember and share our wisdom. When it is time to die, we release the body and return to the collective oneness.

Lily has some message about presiding over this time and helping the transition happen in a healthy way. She helps to develop Elders, who are ripe in not just age, but in wisdom. I am shown a picture of old women who dye their hair purple and get the download that this is sometimes a substitute for inner wisdom. This is a phase of unwinding, of coming back to the essentials.

 

So in summary:

Fringed Lily is a teacher about boundaries between self and other. She can help us in all realms of this, whether it is to open us up to more connected states, or whether we need to learn discernment as to how much we take on. Knowing what is you and what is not, is what protects you. She can help us dip in and out of the collective and our own individuality with ease and grace and to learn to do this at will and directed by our own conscious choosing.

Useful for:

• Those with frayed nerves from living in the collective and not fully integrating and assimilating the experience.
• Not knowing boundaries and when to take a break so as not to get fried.
• Piscean people when out of balance – too open to collective and easy loss of self.
• Those who can’t work out what is them and what is another’s feelings.
• Integrity issues of all types. Codependency from merging with another. Clinginess to others due to loss of self, feel weak without the other.
• Any physical issues stemming from loss of self in relationship.
• Those who need/want to develop awareness of boundaries and hence protection.
• Those not assimilating their experiences and all the information their body is subject to and any ailments from this.
• Very sensitive beings who need to develop how to return to self in order to ground, assimilate and stay healthy, and safe.
• To develop trust in intuitive abilities.
• Developing discernment.

 

You can purchase a 30ml bottle of Fringed Lily flower essence via the shop.

To learn how to hear this sort of guidance from plants, check out the courses on offer both online and in person, via the course link tab at top right.