There is power in delicateness, and we feel this when we are moved by the beauty of a flower.
The beauty of a flower lies in its delicateness. The tender petals, often tissue thin, the tiny stamen, and the arrangement of the petals that seem to barely hold together.
There is fragility in something so delicate and beautiful, so we know to handle a flower with care. If we were to try to protect it with some kind of armour we would simply crush the flower. Something that fragile and magical is not meant to be contained or hidden away, it’s meant to be on show.
The beauty of a flower is there when it is fully open. If the flower were to keep itself closed to protect itself from possible harm, the world would be missing out on profound beauty. Imagine a world with no roses or lilies because all the flowers stayed closed to protect their delicateness?
We also cannot force the flower to toughen up to protect itself, because all the beauty is in the delicateness. Flowers that are hard, brittle or rigid just would not work.
We, as human beings, are also by nature delicate. As babies we express an exquisite and unadulterated beauty that is the essence of who we are. We live this essence fully until life alters us, but before that time the delicate and gorgeous being we are easily melts the hardest of hearts. We inspire, bring joy, open hearts to love, remind what life is all about, and bring healing to those feeling battered or worn down by the harshness of life. Babies remind us of an innate purity we were all born connected to. Like flowers, we handle babies with great care, honouring their sensitivity and never questioning their fragile nature. We accept them as they are – delicate and precious.
As we leave the tender years of babyhood, we may harden our body in an attempt to protect ourselves from the onslaughts of life. Over time this hardening encases the beauty within so that no one can see the delicate person inside. We may even forget that we ourselves are beautiful.
We may toughen ourselves, preferring to meet the world with aggression or defensiveness, portraying a false strength, forgetting that our innocent inner beauty is much more powerful. We can choose to move people away, or we can choose to move them with our beauty.
And, just as it is with babies, our body communicates a fragility every time we mistreat it, handle it roughly, neglect it, or push and drive it. Like a flower being battered in a storm, there is only so much that it can take before it shows the signs or becomes completely tattered.
We rarely see flowers alone; they grow everywhere in all shades, shapes and colours, ready to share their light-hearted playfulness, their sensual depths, their fragrance and inspiring beauty. There is never one beautiful flower and the rest are average – they are all beautiful.
I have seen whole fields of flowers… an ocean of colour, form, and beauty so moving it completely stopped me. I could not be more with my heart to see such grandeur – so simple and so powerful.
Imagine if we too as human beings celebrated our delicateness and always had our beauty on show? What if we collectively dropped the armour, hardness, toughness and masks, and simply let the true, beautiful and delicate person on the inside, out?
And what if we dropped the self-neglect and nurtured ourselves like precious flowers, always taking great care to support and nurture the beautiful being within, so we were always present and on show? What kind of world would that be?
Imagine an ocean, a global field of human beings glorious in their natural beauty, emanating their innate gorgeousness for all to experience.
What would it be like walking in that field every day?
By Melinda Knights, Self employed in the construction industry
Further Reading:
Nature: The Ultimate Reflection
Orchids
All of nature is here to support us to return to who we truly are
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
I feel that many of us harden our bodies as a way of coping when we are young because no one has met us for the sheer beauty of who we are, so we put a protective encasement around our delicateness and forget it is there. Consequently we all go around in hardened shells forgetting our delicateness, and then we all miss out on our divine and delicate nature.
We build a layer of protection to supposedly protect us when young, and as we go through life we can add to this layer of protection, building layers and layers, ending up with us being protected and hard, not a great place for any of us to live life from.
One thing I find that helps melt hardness is when I connect to the warmth in my palms. It’s enough to melt anything!
The more we allow our bodies to feel the more we realise how delicate we innately are and thus tread carefully as we can easily harden again if we are not attentive to how sensitive we are.
What I’m discovering gregbarnes888 is the stillness that is innately within us all. I was on a zoom call with a friend and they supported me to shift some old ideals and beliefs I had taken on from childhood when these had gone I was able to feel a stillness in my body that was matched with the stillness within my friend. So that we were able to sit with each other with no words spoken but we could both feel the fullness of our bodies united in the stillness which was so rich in the holding of both of us. From this stillness it is possible to feel our sensitivity and our delicateness. The way we are currently living does not allow for this deliberately so.
‘Something that fragile and magical is not meant to be contained or hidden away’ how wonderfull would it be if we all connected to both the magic within both ourselves and others as well as the fragility, beauty and love ✨
I feel like this blog has given me a key to remind myself of our innate delicateness and how much it is a strength.
Absolutely Lucy. Living and feeling how delicate and sensitive we are opens us to deeper relationships with everyone in the most Loving ways. Is this not a great strength we all can obtain by being open to our essence/Soul or “our beauty within”?
A couple of months ago being delicate was brought up in conversation and I all but ran away from said conversation. That doesn’t mean I escaped discussing my relationship with delicateness and over time I’ve become less reactive to considering and facing the fact I haven’t been as delicate as I truly am. It’s easier than ever these days to get over that “nope don’t want to face it!” attitude and get on with it.
When something comes up in my body to be looked at, rather than going into immediate reaction of not wanting to know or feel what’s being offered by checking out, I am now able to hold steady and just allow the feelings to surface with no self judgement or condemnation, so that when the feelings are released I can actually feel more space in my body. All these years I have lived in the fear of not wanting to face what was there, but actually there was nothing to fear in the first place, just me playing games with myself and holding myself back from actually evolving.
We see what happens to a flower if its delicateness is being squashed, I wonder if we are aware of all the harm squashing our delicateness does to us?
I love to feel my delicateness… it’s a very strong and full quality that has not one ounce of weakness in it.
Rachel I agree, I too love to feel my delicateness, there is such a deep loveliness to delicacy.
Alexis and rachelmurtagh1 I totally agree with both of you retuning to our sensitivity and delicateness is our innate birth right and this quality can be felt in the stillness of who we truly are. It’s Interesting that currently the world is set up for us all to be in motion so that we do not realise that actually we are stillness first. If we connect to the stillness within first then move with that stillness everything changes, it really is a complete life changer.
I love feeling my delicateness, I am still learning to consistently embrace that quality in all areas of my life.
To maintain and honour our delicateness requires dedication and consistency which brings an ever deepening awareness that is empowering.
I reflected on flowers earlier this morning … well blossom. In that this tree, I think it was a magnolia tree, was out in full bloom yet this week its been really cold. What came to me is flowers/blossom don’t hold back it doesn’t wait for the ‘right’ condition if it’s ready, it just blooms fully in all its glory. Pretty cool and a great reminder for us to do the same.
Melinda this is divine. Truely divine. You have reminded my body on a felt cellular level of it’s and everybody else’s delicateness. And this sentence ‘Imagine an ocean, a global field of human beings glorious in their natural beauty, emanating their innate gorgeousness for all to experience’ evoked in me a similar feeling to that which I have experienced when standing in front of a field of flowers. Glorious. Truly.
Yes it would be glorious to experience that field of human flowers all in their innate gorgeous delicateness!
That would be quite phenomenal to have all humans being delicate.
“We live this essence fully until life alters us”. Is it life that alters us or is it us that change as a result of the life that is around us? I know that for me, it was me that jumped ship from my naturally delicate self and chose to toughen up and change the way that I was with others in an attempt to protect myself from the verbal attacks that I was receiving at school. Life is life, moment by moment we are choosing how to be in response to it.
Alexis as children we do shut down as a result of the life around us and we can remain shut down life after life. We are not taught that everything happens because of energy and that if we were to sense what energy is impulsing us to move, which you say is a moment to moment choice, then we would know when we are choosing abusive energy because we would be abusing to ourselves and others too.
This is so true; ‘Like flowers, we handle babies with great care, honouring their sensitivity and never questioning their fragile nature. We accept them as they are – delicate and precious.’ What I love about this is that we adore them just as they are and would not expect them to be any different.
And yet somewhere along the line, for whatever reason, we start to build layers of protection, and so lose the delicateness we were born with.
It is very lovely to see children who are delicate, sensitive and open, they show us how natural it is to be this way and that we too are this, it is us in our true form without the protection and hardness.
We do adore the delicateness in babies, ‘Babies remind us of an innate purity we were all born connected to. Like flowers, we handle babies with great care, honouring their sensitivity and never questioning their fragile nature. We accept them as they are – delicate and precious.’
Melinda, this article is beautiful and inspiring.
‘And what if we dropped the self-neglect and nurtured ourselves like precious flowers, always taking great care to support and nurture the beautiful being within…’ This would have a huge impact on our health, wellbeing and community interaction. What a transformation to the whole of society if we all chose to live with the preciousness that we are.
Being met with someone who is in their full delicateness is truly gorgeous. It gives permission for us to be in delicateness also. Discarding those layers of hardness and brittleness is truly restorative.
Rachelmurtagh1 I agree with you that there is something truly gorgeous in being met by another person, they can just be going about their day however their movements convey such a flow of beauty and it is possible to feel a vitality that is missing in other people, so that they are arresting because there is something so delicate in the way they move that you cannot but notice them. they may not see you but you know they have met you on a cellular level because they miss nothing when they are walking everything is seen, felt and known.
‘Imagine a world with no roses or lilies because all the flowers stayed closed to protect their delicateness?’ This is a very sobering statement Melinda for when you apply this analogy to ourselves of holding back from showing the delicateness and grace in how we move throughout our day to day lives, it is a bit of a wake up call.
It’s just as well flowers don’t do that, otherwise, we wouldn’t have a reflection of such unrestrained beauty but confirmed that having a wall is natural.
Maybe we are here to reflect that light, that delicateness and beauty, just as the stars continually shine their light for all to see and feel.
With young children I observe that their openness and delicateness and sweetness is on show and it is a beautiful reflection to all of us.
This is the second blog I have read about delicateness today, so it is very clear that there is a message waiting for me to ‘open’. And I am not surprised that this has happened, as over the last few days I have found myself hardening a little in response to a situation in my life. The hardness, which I used to continually live with, doesn’t make an appearance very often these days, therefore I can tell that the message is super important, so I will say yes to it and open my heart to whatever it is offering me.
I find blogs find me too when there is something to consider so go you Ingrid!! I feel also that delicateness goes hand in hand with sacredness and if we can be delicate with ourselves we appreciate how sacred this is and how worth nurturing we are so this becomes our normal and anything other becomes jarring.
Now that delicateness is more normal in my life than ever I too have come to feel the ‘jarring’ when I begin to harden. It is so uncomfortable in my body to be anything else but delicate; definitely a most sacred of feelings.
It is interesting isn’t it Ingrid that in a reaction to a situation we immediately go into hardness to protect ourselves rather than staying open to fully asses the energy that we are in reaction to. It is because we cannot see the energy but can feel it that sets off the reaction of defence. However we cannot protect or defend against the negative energy, but by staying open to it we can let it pass through us without harming us. Like water off a ducks back.
Although quiet, delicacy is as stunning quality and immeasurably powerful.