Themes :
Bower

A bower, filled with flowering trees, offers privacy, secrecy, a place for lovers to meet. Like a garden, a bower is a place where things grow, a place of life. It is the opposite of death, which is the state of nonspirituality. The trees of the bower are rooted in the earth, yet they reach upward toward the sky. What grows in our spiritual bower feeds us through its "fruitfulness" and brings beauty, the awareness of harmony to our consciousness. The flowers represent the spiritual qualities that have opened within us, which in turn cause us to open to the Divine.

Like a garden, the bower is a place of contemplation and rest. It is a place where we give ourselves permission to simply be, to settle into the present moment.

This bower, then, is the space we create within ourselves, through loving devotion, through patient spiritual practice, through the cultivation of that which is best and most true within us. It comes alive within us. It becomes a space we ourselves enter -- we create it it within ourselves and then we enter into it. There we grow silent and still, we find refuge from the world. And there we wait. The perfume of the bower draws the Beloved to our side. At least that's how it appears to the limited perspective of the soul. The truth is closer to this: As we wait, the pure perfume surrounds us, we breathe it in, it finally clears our head and heart, and we see for the first time -- that the Beloved's shining "moon-like" face has been there all along.