Bolting Flowers

Trust the Longer Journey, Blossom Now!

re-post from 1 June 2021

A number of years ago I led some playshops that I dubbed—

Trust the Longer Journey, Blossom Now!

A seeming koan that. If I trust the longer journey then you’d think I might save my blossoms and seeds for farther down the track, as I have a tendency to do anyway. Yet the real trust of a longer journey, I’ve found, is in blossoming now because it’s only when I trust there’ll be more blossoms and seeds—more rapture—ahead that I can ‘let rip’ now.

I must trust an abundance of Source.

Yet there’s also finitude. There’s also the very real reality that this one body I have, this iteration, this individuation of the wider field, is limited in its form.

What I’ve noticed since March 2020 is a whole lot more bolting flowers. Have you ever seen a plant that realizes its resources are limited? It’s been left in a dark, dry corner, root-bound and sad. Before it dies, it will bolt. Out of its normal season, it will make a run for it and shoot up to flower, seed and re-lease.

Propagate. Pro-create. Plant the next generation.

That’s how I see humanity in the past year or so. Without wanting to directly address the deathly elephant in the room, so many people have (perhaps unconsciously) gone,

“F@*k it! If we’re all gonna die, I might as well sing/dance/write/create/be me, before I go!”

The reckoning with death has squeezed the life out of many who were too shy, unprepared, judgmental, lazy or distracted to own up to be-ing free in this lifetime.

Now they feel compelled. We are Nature afterall. If plants do it, why wouldn’t we?