Red Rose and White Lotus (IMS Sidequest)

Episode 85: Red Rose and White Lotus (IMS Sidequest)
How tyrants and sages bloom from the same soil
aired Oct 14, 2025
https://www.shannonheatonmusic.com/episode-85-red-rose-and-white-lotus-ims-sidequest

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[ Music: “Free the Heel,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I’m Shannon Heaton, flute player and host of Irish Music Stories, the show about traditional music. And the bigger stories behind it.

And this is an IMS Sidequest in which I map music from my Perfect Maze album and share fragments from a few stories that helped me navigate the whole project.

Words and music for the bees and butterflies.

[ Music: “Perfect Maze Trio,” from Perfect Maze

Composer: Shannon Heaton

Artists: Shannon Heaton & Friends ]

The title track, Perfect Maze, was inspired by the architecture of the honeycomb.

With five successive black squares, and seven white squares, all in hexagonal shapes

For the 5, there are 35 bars total in this piece… divisible by 5

For the 7, there are 7 beats per measure [counts beats]

And each phrase is six bars [counts bars]

Six bar phrase for the hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells. Perfect little mazes that have allowed bees to survive—and have helped humans thrive—for centuries and centuries and centuries.

Honeybees probably evolved from wasps over 100 million years ago. They quickly dialed in an incredible, cooperative division of labor. Each colony has a single reproductive queen, sterile female workers, and male drones. They have evolved to survive in various climates and habitats, but their collective, socialist governing system has been constant.

[ Music: “Celtic Grooves,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Once early humans got the idea from other animals to break into bees’ nests, honey became a big part of the hunter-gatherer diet. As people moved to farming, we started keeping bees with human-made hives, to ensure ample supplies of food, balms for wounds, beeswax for sealing containers and candles. That’s when we also began relying on bees and other insects to pollinate crops.

Now we are totally dependent on pollinators. Bats help with the mangoes and bananas; butterflies pollinate apples, cherries, potatoes, and sunflowers; beetles are the primary pollinators of louts flowers. Andt bees pollinate most of the rest of our food crops and flowering plants. Even though we are disrupting their habitats with all our construction projects, big farms, pesticides, and human driven climate change.

In the Spring of 2020, the bees got a big break from all our interruption. It was the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. Many of us were grounded. The roads were empty. It was cleaner, quieter, better for all the pollinators and trees.

My carbon footprint was certainly lower—instead of flying to Colorado, for example, to collaborate with flutist Christina Jennings, we each did online events from our separate homes in Boulder and Boston. One of her offerings was a program for an environmental virtual conference.

[ Music: Season of Change from Perfect Maze

Composer: Shannon Heaton

Artist: Christina Jennings ]

I wrote her this tone poem called “Season of Change.” The first few phrases trace an Irish-style melody. A simple exposition to settle into a moody, dark, wood flute-inspired world; and to pave the way for a wistful waltz.

I was thinking of moments of transition. And adaptation. How people had pulled together and tried to care for one another, and keep one another safe. We learned to stay connected remotely, and to find hope and inspiration during really dark, scary times. How we had started thinking bee. For a moment anyway.

It was so sweet and kind of weird to pass people walking around the neighborhood and the local woods, waving to one another from a distance, to see people work in their gardens, as we walked laps around our town.

[ Music: “Hometown Lullaby,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

There are some great pollinator gardens around here. And we have a few neighbors who grow roses. When I heard of the plan to pave over the White House historic rose garden, removing a big patch of living green space that would be home to a vast population of pollinators and other invertebrates. I wrote this story called Red Rose and White Lotus.

[ Music: “Aristotle’s Air,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt & Shannon Heaton ]

The summer of 1485 was a busy time for English bees and their keepers. Pagans had loved honey bees from the moment they started coming in from Europe. And interest in bees surged as churches built up their congregations and needed huge supplies of beeswax candles.

The English–and English bees—also loved roses. Eleanor of Provence (the Queen of England for 36 years) had taken the white rose as her symbol back in 1236. Then the first Duke of York took it as his family’s badge in the mid 14th century. A hundred years later, the Yorks began fighting the red rose Lancaster family for control of the throne. At least 35,000 were drafted and killed over the 32-year Wars of the Roses.

While a few rich families carried out their own power struggles, wrecking havoc on their people and the landscape, rose petals, candles, and honey helped get people through: a bit of beauty, a bit of sweetness; candlelight at religious services; magical mead-soaked midsummer solstice celebrations. Anything to bring some cheer.

In August 1485, as the roses were tucking into their late summer blooming cycles and the bees were taking advantage of the August pollen flows and recruiting a new generation of workers to weather the winter, Henry Tudor and his 7,000 men army killed the white rose King Richard III.

The poor exhausted civilians limped back to their rose gardens and candle-filled Sunday masses. And they admitted that while their freshly dead king had usurped the throne (by locking his nephews in a tower). And he had, like many kings before him, executed his enemies. But he’d also put some reforms in place that benefited commoners. So he hadn’t been all that bad. Still, people were so tired of the War of the Roses that they were happy enough with the change of leadership and the end of the battles.

The new King Henry VII restored political order. He  set up a tax system to improve roads and public works. His eldest son Arthur was primed to take over. But Arthur died at age 15. So when Henry VII died of tuberculosis, 15 year old goofy, sporty Henry Jr was crowned King Henry VIII.

Like other historic and modern figures who inherited and then squandered vast riches and power, Henry VIII inherited a prosperous, well ordered kingdom, which he ripped apart during his reign. He also ripped his subjects apart. He executed 70,000 in 38 years. Anyone who annoyed or challenged him. He was lewd, adulterous. He would have been intolerable on social media.

He spared his first wife Catherine. But because she was only able to conceive one surviving girl child, after 24 years of marriage and multiple miscarriages, Henry asked the Pope for a divorce. The Roman Pope said no. So Henry created his own English Church and appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. He named his friend Thomas the Archbishop, and Thomas granted Henry his first divorce.

Henry would go on to behead his second wife, grieve the death of his third (with whom he had a male child who ended up being king for a minute, before his firstborn Mary and then second child Elizabeth took over). Henry divorced his fourth wife, beheaded his fifth, and adored number six, until she wanted to become a Protestant. He preferred the Catholic faith, even though he’d established himself as the head of the English church, which led England to become a Protestant country.

But the church thing for him was about power. About having access to divorce,  and about maintaining a patriarchal, hierarchical church.

Still, the Protestants were paining him. And Henry VIII became increasingly irritable. By age 50 he was riddled with leg ulcers and was medically obese. But he still had enough vitality to cut down critics, dismantle the government, and push politics and religion under one fat crown, calling any attempts to restrict his royal power contrary to God’s will.

Henry VIII held on to absolute power in his bones. Then he died of a bone infection in 1547.

[Music: Hometown lullaby reprise ]

When planting roses, gardeners often toss bone meal in the bottom of the hole. It gives an immediate boost of nutrients. Bone meal can also help lotus plants develop strong root systems.

India’s national flower, the lotus, grows in some places in England. But the lotus isn’t a beloved sacred symbol for the Brits the way it is for their former subjects in India.

[ Music: “Little Bird Lullaby,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Hindus believe their God Brahama emerged from a lotus. Many of their deities are depicted on lotus flowers. Buddhists say that when their prophet Siddhartha Gautama was born ( 200 years before Aristotle) seven lotus flowers bloomed. And then seven days after Prince Siddharta was welcomed into the garden of life, his mother died. His father supported him at the royal palace for 29 years. Then when Siddharta’s son was born, he left the newborn, and his cousin/wife, and his King/dad to live on the streets. He wanted to get a taste of humility and suffering. It took a while for his dad to get over that—he was disappointed that his son had chosen to do a walkabout instead of inheriting the throne. But he made peace with it once his son found enlightenment and founded Buddhism.

Most Indians eventually chose Hinduism over Buddhism. The practices are not terribly conflicting; but power hungry men still managed to use the name of religion to create clashes and keep different ‘castes’ segregated.

But Siddhartha’s teachings and lotus plants took root in the Kingdom of Thailand. Today over 90% of Thai people are Buddhist, and they believe the louts symbolizes transformation: the way it roots in muddy soil, and opens into large floating leaves; the way it sends up long stems with buds that flower during the day and close back into the mud at night.  Similar to the way that roses can grow out of a pile of manure, the white lotus symbolizes how beauty can emerge from ugly circumstances.

To guarantee survival, lotus plants produce a profusion of seeds every year. Some germinate quickly, some are eaten by wild animals, some fall into the water, some sit dormant for months. Some sit for hundreds of years. Then with the right water temperature, full sun, warm wet soil, and a few bees, butterflies, and beetles to carry lotus pollen from flower to flower, new plants can grow.

But it takes serendipity—it takes assistance for lotus seeds to germinate and develop into flowering plants. It also takes a team (and timing) for a human to transform from rich princes to unattached wise being of light. Or for a wealthy heis to turn into tyrants or a benevolent king.

[ Music: “Bua Khao,” from Perfect Maze

Composer: T.P. Apaiwong arr. Heaton

Artist: Shannon Heaton & Friends ]

This is the only track on my Perfect Maze album that I didn’t compose. It’s my arrangement of Bua Khao (white lotus), the 1930s song by Thanpuying Puwungroi Apaiwong.

This was one of my first favorite songs. It paints this amazing scene: a white lotus in full bloom, surrounded by a colony of bees. But instead of saying /Pueng Bin/, the bee flies, Apaiwong wrote /mu pumarin/ which is a more elegant way of saying it.

This is the thing about old style songs. The timeless language and the thoughtful way of settings scenes is usually pretty compact. And pretty beautiful.

I learned Bua Khao from my teacher, Aacharn Jiraporn Lekpong, during my first year of college in Suphanburi, which is in the central part of Thailand. I thought the song was traditional, because the words and the melody hang so well with really old songs like Dueng Dawk Mai, and Phleng Lao Dueng Duen. But Bua Khao is just under 100 years old.

Puwungroi Apaiwong played guitar and piano. She wrote music for the Thai royal family, and was pretty prolific. But this was her big hit. And I thought it would sound really great going into Matt Heaton’s Broken Branches march here.

[ music swells ]

UNESCO, the cultural organization of the UN, named Bua Khao Song of Asia in 1979. UNESCO was founded in 1945 to advance human rights—to build global peace by investing in education, science, and culture. The United States was a founding member of UNESCO. We’ve withdrawn on two occasions. first under the Reagan administration, and again in 2017. And then we were accepted back both times.

When Arkansas Senator James Fulbright created his international fellowship program, because he said international efforts in education would “do more in the long run for peace than any number of trade treaties.” Without education, he said, there is no science—and no trust in science. And science is what shapes our cultures, our beliefs, our mindsets.

[ Music: “Meaning of Life,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Through the Fulbright program, my parents taught at the University of Nsukka—it was actually in Nigeria that I started playing the recorder and tin whistle, from a Belgian music teacher in our neighborhood. Through Fulbright, my mom taught in Slovenia, and my husband Matt and I went on tours around Thailand, singing Irish songs and learning Thai songs from local students and teachers. This has definitely shaped our beliefs, values, and mindsets.

On July 22, 2025, as bees processed abundant stores of nectar into honey… and as populations of hives soared… as queen bees went on mating flights… and as caterpillars were feeding on milkweed, with toxins to protect them from predators once they transform into adult butterflies… On that second-shortest day of this year, the current U.S. administration announced it would once again withdraw our nation from UNESCO.

All things are cyclical.

By October, the American yellow lotus, the only lotus native to the United States will be entering a period of dormancy. Its leaves and stems will turn brown. The plants will store energy in underwater tubers. And dormant lotus seeds will nestle in their thick, protective shells, maybe for a very long time.

A white lotus, in full bloom, shines in a large pond.

Flowers and leaves, so pure, so refreshing.

In the clear water, fish play and splash.

A colony of bees hums near fragrant flowers, drinking the sweet nectar.

A small boat floats by, gliding farther into the ocean

– Bua Khao by Thanpuying Puangroi Apaiwong (transl. Heaton)

Thank you for listening to stories about roses and lotus flowers. I hope you’ll tune in next time for a fairy tale fit for a king.

Find this podcast (and subsidiary sidequests) … and order copies of the Perfect Maze CD… or sheet music for the Perfect Maze Trio, Season of Change, or any of the pieces on the album.. at shannonheatonmusic.com.