Of Saints, Roses & the Unbidden Unveiling of Light

Many believe that the deaths of saints and departing of souls is really less of an end and more of a subtle migration. Their fleshly mortality wanes, yes, but the closing of the chapter of embodied form doesn’t cut the line. The veil frays and the body slackens, yet some essence dislodges itself and moves along another axis of presence. The cults of the early saints and the persistence of relic culture tells us as much, and that’s just what the narrative of modern culture has allowed to overtly persist.

Saint Catherine, a young mystic who spoke across the Alps to sway the papal throne, died in 1380 when she was just 33. She was mourned in her community as though the very spirit of Siena itself had been extinguished.

You see, it was Siena that had forged her: the narrow stone lanes, days upon days of fasting, the innumerable ecstasies, the dictation of scorching letters to the Pope from spirit…to leave her entire body to Rome was to leave Siena bereft of its own marrow.

She did not belong to Rome.

The community wanted her to rest with them. They needed her there. And so, a quiet dispatch of devoted pilgrims descended upon Rome with a single purpose after she died. They weren’t able to remove her entire body in secret, but they were committed to carrying what they could: her head, wrapped in linen, stowed away for return to its rightful homeland.

It is here the story fractures into the miraculous — or into metaphor, depending on one’s appetite and courage for the numinous.

Personally, I don’t believe in metaphors. At all. I think they’re either a tool for secrets and deception, or a lazy elected narrative for those who are committed to not taking responsibility for their choices and the undeniable power they have to shift the arc of the planet.

But I digress.

So when Roman guards intercepted the pilgrims at the city’s edge, inspecting for contraband and theft, they opened the linen bag. They didn’t see the grisly relic of a severed head. They saw a sack brimming with rose petals: pale, cool, and impossibly fragrant.

They were permitted to pass. No questions asked.

Upon reaching Siena and unveiling the bundle, there she was again: the head of Catherine, intact and uncorrupted, her delicate features preserved not by an embalmer’s art, but — as the faithful insist — by her very grace, even in death. Her head was enshrined, where it remains to this day, in the Basilica of San Domenico — neither grotesque nor adorned, but a relic of such strange vitality that pilgrims cross centuries to stand in its presence.

{Who wants to go?!}

Such accounts remind the reader that sanctity, in its deepest expression, resists oppression and corruption, and that truth can persist in ways we can’t possibly comprehend. One may hide the holy in sackcloth or bind it in secrecy, but the nature of the sacred is to eventually reveal itself, unbidden. It can’t help it. Light leaks. Fragrance escapes. The unexplainable seeps through. And we should be so blessed as to witness it.

Holy things have a way of revealing themselves.

Within the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, there exists the figure of the tertön — the treasure revealer — one who, by no mastery of their own, becomes the vessel through which hidden teachings surface. The terma, “hidden treasures”, are not always scrolls or relics concealed in caves or beneath monastery stones. They are sometimes embedded in the expanse of mind, the subtle tissue of awareness, waiting for a moment, a conjunction, an era when their unveiling is required.

And sometimes, yes. An unveiling is required.

The tertön does not create, summon or manifest. The tertön retrieves. The revelation is not innovation but an act of fidelity: of drawing forth what was entrusted, centuries prior, for the sake of a future drought. It’s an intersection of space, time, intention and potential that opens a direct portal to heaven through which blessings can be received.

One might say saintly relics too are a kind of living terma — their bones, their heads, their incorrupt flesh not merely biological remainder but repositories of flame, folded into time until the hour struck when they must be raised. By you.

Some hidden things aren’t meant to stay buried. Some concealments are only quiet interludes in a longer arc of return.

It is worth recalling, as Christ warned, that treasures stored on earth become brittle, moth-eaten, rusty and easily plundered. He taught us that we should store our treasures in heaven, an incorruptible realm. That would imply that treasures can also be retrieved from heaven. Sign me up for that yatra please.

There are also treasures not meant to be locked in vaults or hoarded in the deep chambers of the self. There are knowings, callings, long-buried obediences that, like the terma of the Tibetan tertöns, emerge when time ripens and no sooner. Sometimes buried in landscape, sometimes in scripture, sometimes in the recesses of a soul, they press toward surface with their own strange logic.

In certain transmissions of Kundalini Yoga, a meditation is taught where the practitioner imagines their head transforming into a rose — not metaphorically, but in literal felt presence: petal by petal unfurling from the skull, the cranium softening into a flower of lush, fragrant surrender.

While this particular meditation emerges within in 20th-century teachings, it draws unconsciously from a deeper well: the rose as symbol in Sufi mysticism, the Marian rose of Christian devotion, the Rosicrucian rose at the heart of the cross — each tradition holding, in its own register, the idea that consciousness may evolve not by conquest, but by flowering.

In 2019 I did said rose meditation in a room of 100+ women. It was a crash course in shapeshifting that left behind seeds that our auras will germinate in the decades to come, but only if and when we’re ready Our auric fields are the ultimate treasure revealers.

In this rose meditation the practitioner’s head obliterates its dashboard of rationality and decision making and becomes instead an offering — not a mind sharpened but a crown softened, perfumed, turned outward toward the Beloved.

What is notable here is not the technique, but the lineage of longing it gestures toward — across traditions, across centuries: that we might cease clenching, and instead, in some quiet and {im}possible way, bloom and be beheld. Impart through presence. Take pleasure in the being of it all.

Revelation is the new manifestation. This is my new mantra. I’m all about the encounter, and the reveal that follows. The instantaneous blessing of a wisdom so magnificent that it completely and utterly changes the course of our life in an afternoon. Revelation is one of the few things that can actually change the field of the heart, which I believe is the seat of the subconscious mind. {Other things would be repetition and trauma.}

And by field I mean both an energetic realm of influence and a literal earthly territory to sow seeds. Chew on that for a few minutes.

These lineages of petal and pearl, these treasure revealers, these pilgrims of the heart and sowers of the field, what do they reveal in us? What truth lies half-hidden, glimmering just beneath the surface, of our every day patterns and footsteps? What petitions have we written only in our minds? What prayers are stored in our bodies, waiting for a fracture in time through which they might be drawn forth?

Some of these treasures defy explanation. They don’t owe themselves to anyone, even us. They just have a way of announcing themselves when they’re revealed.

And their unveiling, even in the still, silent dark, will be known by their fragrance.