The Dandelion and the Lion

Every August, as the Sun moves through Leo, I find myself thinking about the lion.

August 8 has become known in contemporary spiritual circles as the Lion’s Gate—a symbolic threshold associated with Leo, the Sun, Sirius, and an opening into greater consciousness. What fascinates me, personally, about the Lion’s Gate is the invitation contained within the image.

The lion. Courage. Sovereignty. Fire. The solar plexus. The heart.

And lately, the lion has begun to speak to me differently. Not simply as an image of masculine strength. But as the lioness. As the Great Mother herself.

Many scholars today actually see the Great Sphinx as the Great Lioness, protector of the Giza Plateau. In ancient Egypt, Sekhmet was the solar lioness—the Eye of Ra. She carried the fierce, destructive radiance of the Sun: a force capable of purification, transformation, and terrible destruction.

Yet beside Sekhmet stands Hathor. Love. Beauty. Joy. Fertility. Nourishment.

They appear almost as two faces of the same primordial power: fierce solar consciousness and maternal tenderness.

I have been sitting with this polarity. Because I recognize it. I recognize it in the world. And I recognize it in myself.

We often imagine power and tenderness as opposites. To be powerful is to become harder. To be vulnerable is to become softer. One protects us. The other exposes us. But what if this separation is part of our forgetting? What if our real work is learning to hold both?

Courageous Tenderness

For some time, I have been thinking about the relationship between the heart and the solar plexus. The heart says: Remain open. The solar plexus answers: I can hold this. The heart feels. The solar plexus steadies. One receives. One gives us the courage to remain present with what has been received. Without courage, vulnerability can become overwhelm. Without tenderness, power can become domination. Together they become something else.

Courageous tenderness

Perhaps that is the lionheart. Not the absence of fear. Not power over another. The capacity to remain open without abandoning our strength. The capacity to encounter enormous forces—grief, love, uncertainty, change—without either collapsing beneath them or armoring ourselves against them.

A recent contemplative experience kept me returning to this question of integration: fierce power does not need to be conquered or suppressed. It needs to become embodied. Fire can become illumination. Instinct can become sovereignty.

I wonder whether this is part of what the Great Mother is asking of us now.

The Great Mother Is Not Only Gentle

We often sentimentalize the feminine. Mother. Nurturer. Comforter. Softness. But nature herself tells a much larger story.

The Great Mother births and destroys. She sends rain and drought. She grows forests and burns them. She decomposes the fallen tree and feeds its body back into the soil. Creation and destruction belong to the same great cycle. This is Shakti in the eastern Indian tradition.

Perhaps the Great Mother does not need us to make her safe. Perhaps she asks us to become capable of relationship with her immensity.

This is where the lioness becomes important. Sekhmet's fierceness does not have to disappear for Hathor's joy to emerge. The deeper invitation is integration—the movement of overwhelming power into relationship, embodiment, and eventually nourishment—a movement from destructive intensity toward joy, with both aspects necessary to transformation.

And suddenly I find myself back at the heart.

What Are We Protecting?

There is another dimension of the lion that has been arising for me. The lioness protects. Not indiscriminately. She protects what she loves.

And this has caused me to wonder whether spiritual courage is ultimately less about what we are willing to fight against than what we are willing to stand for. What within us is so tender that it requires our courage? Our deepest knowing? Our creativity? Our relationship with the Earth? Our capacity to love? Our deep soul self?

Perhaps sovereignty is not becoming invulnerable. Perhaps sovereignty is becoming strong enough that our vulnerability no longer needs to hide. That feels very different from the forms of power our culture often celebrates. Power over. Control. Certainty. Dominance.

Instead, the lionheart says:

I will protect what allows me to remain alive.

The Dandelion and the Lion

During a recent spiritual journey, however, I wasn't shown a magnificent lion or even lioness.

I was shown something much more ordinary.

Dandelions.

A carpet of green covered in brilliant yellow flowers. Unapologetically yellow. Resilient. Useful to soil and insects. Growing where no one had planted them. Growing, in fact, where many people didn't want them. We call them weeds. But perhaps "weed" tells us more about ourselves than it does about the dandelion.

What struck me was their complete lack of apology. They were simply expressing their nature. And then I learned something that delighted me.

Dandelion comes from the French dent de lion: tooth of the lion.

The lioness had appeared again. Only this time it wasn't roaring. It was growing quietly beneath my feet—the dandelion and its deep taproot, its ability to reach water in difficult conditions, and its extraordinary capacity to return after apparent destruction.

Perhaps courage sometimes looks like that. Rooted deeply. Reaching for water. Blooming regardless.

August 8

So this year, just after the devastating fires that destroyed over 700 homes in my community, I approached the Lion's Gate differently. Not as something arriving from somewhere else. Not as cosmic energy I must capture. Not as another spiritual threshold I must somehow become worthy enough to cross. I wondered about another possibility.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Yeshua offers one of his stranger and more enigmatic teachings:

“Blessed is the lion that the human eats, so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human that the lion eats, and the lion becomes human.”

I don't pretend to know precisely what Yeshua intended by this mysterious saying. But I have begun to sit with it contemplatively.

What if the Lion is also the Lioness?

What if, for me, she carries something of the Great Mother herself? Not the sentimental Mother. Not simply the nurturing Mother. The primordial Mother. Creation and destruction. Love and ferocity. The power that births stars and burns forests, that breaks down what has died and creates the conditions for something new to emerge.

Ancient Egypt knew this face of the feminine as Sekhmet—the solar lioness, the fierce Eye of Ra. But Sekhmet and Hathor reveal two poles of a larger mystery: fierce solar power and ecstatic nourishment, destruction and joy.

Perhaps the task is neither to worship this power nor to fear it.

Perhaps we must learn to metabolize it. That word has stayed with me. To metabolize something is not to conquer it. It is to take something immense into ourselves and allow relationship with it to transform us. Perhaps this is one way I can receive Yeshua's lion.

When the lion consumes us, unconscious power can become fear, rage, domination, destruction. But when we "eat the lion"—when we become capable of receiving its ferocity without being possessed by it—something changes.

The lion becomes human. Power becomes embodied. Ferocity becomes courage. Instinct becomes wisdom. Fire becomes illumination. And perhaps this is what the Great Mother has been teaching me.

Do not be afraid of my power. Learn how to hold it.

Not only in the mind. In the body. In the belly. In the heart.

First, let the belly become spacious enough to hold what feels unholdable. Grief. Fear. Rage. Not to solve it. Not to transcend it. To hold it. Then let the heart remain open. Tender, but not powerless. Vulnerable, but not without boundaries. Fierce, but not cruel.

Perhaps this is how Sekhmet finds Hathor within herself. Perhaps this is how fire becomes illumination. Perhaps this is how power becomes joy. And perhaps this is what the lioness has been guarding all along. Not a throne. Not a kingdom. The vulnerable center. The place within us where life still wants to bloom.

On August 8, I will think of the lioness. But I will also think of the dandelion. The magnificent and the ordinary. The roar and the yellow flower. The fierce Mother and the tender heart. And I will try to remember:

We do not become powerful by abandoning our softness.

We become powerful when we discover that our softness is worth protecting.

Perhaps that is courageous tenderness. Perhaps that is sovereignty. Perhaps that is the Lion's Gate we are being invited to walk through.