Consider the lilies: Consider the bins!
A walk through some Manchester streets to Whitworth park showed an interesting variety of care for the environment. In some key streets there were so many gardens with great white lilies and other flowers, but certainly the lilies were outstanding. Unfortunately there was also a lot of litter and overflowing bins not far away. How some people can show so much care and then so nearby there are bins that could be cleared of the rubbish shows the variety of human attitudes there are. It is not fair on those that take a pride in their surroundings and go the extra mile to grow and water flowers. Manchester City council has a system similar to North Lincs where the bins are only collected every other week. Well! Well done to the London Borough of Hounslow that collects and recycles every week. Sad to say the streets here in my local area would be far worse if this was not the case.
Whitworth park was founded by Joseph Whitworth around 1890 and as an industrialist he gave the land and created a park with a boating lake for the people of the city of Manchester. How many corporations are buying prime real estate in cities and giving it to the people who live there as a green open space ?Are the city planners allowing for more green space as the need for building more homes, bigger schools increases and developers want to gain as much profit as possible from land bought? Are there any more benevolent capitalists like Joseph Whitworth?
There are charities like the wildlife trusts that buy land for conservation of wildlife and rely on the contributions of ordinary folk.
Some of the photos show how people in Manchester do care about having gardens and alleyways with flowers, small plots of green, and support for their green spaces. Manchester City Council has recycling bins but could maybe step up to having some of those bins collected more often than twice a week!
And the symbolism of Lilies? Well, one was Cleanliness! From a bit of Internet trawling the biblical lilies of the field in Palestine might not have been white; possibly red. It seems that lilies might have been a very generic term like daisies. Maybe Jesus was referring to a wide variety of flowers from the Liliaceae family with a variety of colours.
So from the sacred insight to the more profane. We humans love to appropriate the world around us. If lilies are used to represent death, loss and funerals they can also be symbolic of birth and reproduction Look carefully inside the lily. White Lilies are supposed to have a pistil like a phallus and be highly erotic. This is from the Greeks who also felt the pollen symbolised fertility. No close up photos at present! Well I was asked to spice up my blog!
Some extracts from internet on Lily symbolism and myth.
Purity, modesty, virginity, majesty, it’s heavenly to be with you. The white lily is linked to Juno, the queen of the gods in Roman mythology, by the story that while nursing her son Hercules, some excess milk fell from the sky creating the group of stars we call the Milky Way, and lilies were created from what milk fell to the earth. The Easter lily is also known as the symbol of the Virgin Mary.
(I have just read an intriguing fictional insight into a Mary’s grief , by Colm Tobin ‘The Testament of Mary’)
And from the Tarot, there are three cards which have lilies portrayed in them! The magician one looked the closest resemblance to white lilies in the background.
I have been told my garden in Spain is surviving my absence while visiting family and friends in the UK. Thanks to friends there! Maybe I will be back in time to see if my lilies are still in bloom. The wild part will hopefully have had some rain but from now there can be long periods of dry weather.
NavasolaNature 