19 – Wish & Prayer

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Keyword – Desire

Have you retained the capacity to genuinely desire?

From childhood, many of us learn to silence our desires. Don’t ask for too much. Be realistic. That’s selfish. You can’t afford it. Who do you think you are? Everyone else needs you. Repeated often enough, these voices can become so familiar that we stop recognising the quieter longings of our own soul.

Wish & Prayer invites you to recover the faculty of desire — to become curious about what you genuinely long to explore, create, learn, change, contribute or experience. Before asking How could I possibly do that?, it encourages the more revealing questions: What do I really desire? Why do I desire it? And what prevents me from admitting that I do?

Like the childhood delight of holding a Dandelion seed head, filling your heart with a wish and blowing with all your might, this essence reconnects us with something wonderfully simple — the freedom to desire before fear tells us all the reasons we cannot.

The Dandelion carries that desire through a natural progression: desire, prayer, release and possibility. The wish acknowledges what lives within your heart. Prayer brings that desire sincerely into relationship with God. Action gives it movement. And, like releasing the seeds to the wind, surrender allows you to let go of the demand to control exactly how, when or where your desire must take root.

This is not a promise that every wish will be fulfilled. Loving desires may still require learning, planning, resources, courage, cooperation and change. Rather, this essence encourages you not to destroy a possibility before you have even allowed yourself to explore it.

Invitation: This essence invites you to explore the desires you may have silenced through fear, conditioning, shame, obligation or resignation — to examine them through love and truth, bring them sincerely to God, take the loving steps available to you, and release what you cannot control.

Loving qualities: Desire • Prayer • Faith • Hope • Courage • Imagination • Surrender • Possibility

Patterns revealed: Suppressed desire • Resignation • Hopelessness • Self-sacrifice • Fear of disappointment • Limiting beliefs • Feeling insignificant • Fear of asking • Controlling outcomes • Giving up before beginning