Full Bloom

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Beside my house is a cactus plant they call the Century Tree.

Only once in a hundred years – it flowers gracefully.

And you never know when it will bloom…   ~ Victoria Williams, lyrics, Century Plant

Oh, the peculiar yearning this old song awakened in me.

I listened to Victoria Williams a lot in the nineties (I even saw her sing at the old Bottom Line where I spent an inordinate amount of time). But this lyric rolled right off me. I supposed I imagined I was in the first bud of adulthood. Young, cute enough, in love with a good and stalwart young man, a career path just starting to open ahead of me after many years of twisting and struggling.

But I just recently listened again, after forgetting about it for years and years, and it pierced me this time, setting a flock of questions into flight.

Why, when I have tried in so many ways to live a generative life, does it still feel like there is some essential potential that has yet to be fulfilled?

What is the nagging desire that has emerged late in life – (not late by standard assumptions, but I’ve been living with a slow time bomb in my body longer than most) - to reach toward full bloom, unfolding every petal, exposing the entire pistil to the sun and wind, releasing every seed, every speck of pollen?

Have I ever really bloomed?

I have no idea.

And it’s not just me. Friends my age, friends who have survived cancers, friends burying or caring for elders – so many seem to be asking:

Have I bloomed? Might I still?

Is it too late?

Is this the moment?

If I reveal myself in all my primal splendor will anyone care?

Should that even matter?

Why is it, just when I reach the point when women my age are no longer reflected as beautiful or powerful or valuable do I have the impulse to bare myself wholly and more than ever before?

Strange life. Why can we never be sure if we have played out every card we have been dealt? How do we know what aces might be hidden, even from ourselves, in our own sleeves and secret pockets?

Is it the lingering remnants of adolescent fantasies of changing the world, accomplishing something extraordinary and dramatic, even though we long ago resigned ourselves to the reality that few will ever play such a role, and that to do so is costly, and far from safe or desirable? Haven’t we all abandoned such earth-shattering ambitions as youthful folly?

Think about the sun Pippin,

Think about her golden glance,

How she lights the world up,

Well, now it’s your chance.

With the guardians of splendor

Inviting you to dance,

Pippin, think about the sun!

 ~ Stephen Schwartz

Maybe it is the time that is upon us. Maybe it calls on everyone to pull out the very best they’ve got to get through the unfolding polycrisis. Maybe now is the time for us all to bust out and give all we can.

Maybe its just living long enough to have seen some shit go down and the mysterious internal imperative to pass it on to soothe or feed others. The urgency of planting every seed I’ve got, of continuously emptying, refilling, and emptying my pockets.

I don’t want to die with anything locked in my clenched fists that I could have shared.

There are other instincts lingering in this fantasy of wholehearted flowering: of reaping some harvest or reaching some fruition that has always been just out of reach. The wish to expand, grow, all the way to the end. The desire to spread the word that there is beauty and power living inside all of us, and every piece of the earth we dwell on, that will only reveal its bloom when we pay right attention.

I dream I am with the kids at a beach. “Look at the sun!” I say – and the moment I do the usual sunset is transformed into an enormous day-star, bright and close, obscuring the whole horizon. My eyes stay wide open, and this sun is textured with segments and sunspots, like the center of a giant celestial daisy.

It is breathtaking. I clamor to take a photo but am flummoxed by my phone. The sun sets slowly, impeccably, a cacophony of light and color. I am only able to capture the image once it is almost gone. The second it disappears behind the horizon, a small, white, everyday sun appears high in the sky, around 1:00pm, as if the day has been reset.

The sun, the cactus tree, the desert blooms all around tell me that it is an exquisite necessity to turn your full glory toward the sky, if only for a brief season.

Have I? Will I?  

Who knows?

Part of me thinks that this is the first moment in my life that I’ve ever been confident enough to even consider the attempt. Part of me thinks about all the ways I was taught that my job was to feed the flowers, assume a supporting role, a stem, a root, a leaf, and never dare to bloom myself.

May the long time sun shine upon you, all love, surround you. And the pure light within you, guide your way on… ~ The Incredible String Band

I have no regrets, but I do wonder what was pruned, what was stunted by the soil I grew in, the era, gender, and history, I was embedded in. Or by myself, my hesitancy, my need to self-protect from a world that only gave me any indication that it was willing to receive anything I offered - so late in the day.

Now, I no longer care if there is anyone to receive or appreciate it. Even if I have grown, against all odds, in a crack of the asphalt of a vast and barren parking lot with no healthy soil in sight, I still want it, all of it, every bit of it, dispersed to the wind, open to the sky. Whatever the outcome, I will have done what I was put here to do.

And why the temptation to devalue the daily unfolding and all I have sent out into the world in the course of ordinary living? Why the futurizing? Why the timeline?

Why not assume we are all always, cyclically perennially, blooming?

An uncanny new imperative, with no idea what purpose or function it selves, except perhaps to assure that I carry on, continuously peeking around every curve in the loops I’ve been thrown, seeking out the perfect conditions to flourish.

And the sun was shining on that day, just like today…

What would this big old bloom look like? What fruition, what unfinished business is there to even reach for?

Sometimes I think of all I might have done if I had not done it so stubbornly alone. Sometimes I think about all I have been able to do because I wouldn’t linger near those who told me I couldn’t.

I grew, sometimes forcibly, sometimes against my will, into the only person I could possibly become.

Maybe this is the bloom of life, to know who you are and who you are not, and to live that out ferociously, the only priority, the most essential mandate.

‘Cause you never know when they will bloom. You never know when they will bloom.