Rose

The rose is the flower of love and of mystical unfolding. Medieval Christian tradition gives us Mary as the mystical rose, and Dante’s Paradiso culminates in a rose of light at the heart of heaven. Sufi poetry uses the rose as the Beloved — its thorns the necessary pain of love. Jung treated the rose as a feminine variant of the mandala: a circle that opens. The color of the dream-rose is important. Red is love in its embodied form; white, purity and the self in becoming; black, a love that has known loss; golden, spiritual love that has passed through all the others. Notice whether the rose is budded, open, or wilting.