Blooming Moon
Growth Requires Faith, Patience, and Good Timing
This year, to challenge myself to write more regularly, I send out dispatches around each new moon to comment on the personal and collective themes I feel pulled to share for each lunation.
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Happy Earth Day! We made it to the beginning of another moon cycle here on spaceship Earth. Are the flowers blooming in your part of the world? The lilac, strawberries, dogwood and dandelions are going wild in my yard this week, even as reports of more snow in coming days roll in. The bald eagles are feasting on the afterbirth of the cows new leggy calfs. The mustangs’ foals run through the high run-off lakes I drive past on my commute each day. Spring is here.
Thank all that is good that we have passed through the fires of the inflamed new moon last Friday to arrive now in the greener pastures of Taurus season. Did you feel the heat, metaphorically, emotionally, or literally?
I was at a labor union conference over the past weekend, and when I say the conversations got heated, I mean there were some full-on flame outs and crispy edges as we navigated setting the budget and legislative priorities of our state’s union for the next cycle. Our animosity was seeded long ago, but bloomed at this particular moment as a tipping point. Despite our inflamed heads butting together, we were able to reach consensus and finished our business. We made plans for follow-up conversations and being more prepared next time. We agreed that we should not be wasting energy fighting each other: we were a union, after all! Falling apart and coming together, in quick succession. Like a coin flip, spinning from definitely not ok to compromise in as many seconds as it takes to call heads or tails. How was your transition from fire to earth seasons?
I missed one of my favorite spring rituals this year: apple blossom time. I have a ritual of going to the state Capital Grounds and frolicking under the apple blossom trees with my sweetheart while listening to Emmy Rossum’s version of “I’ll be with you in Apple Blossom Time”. Twirling under the blossoms always makes me feel lushly romantic and alive.
We had a heatwave in mid-March and it panicked the plants into blooming sooner than they should. By the time April 1st rolled in and I went to check on the apple trees at the Capital grounds, the pale pink petals were already shed and gone. We could hardly find a trace of them-only a few dozen crushed dirtied petals that still clung to the corners of the lawn the leaf blowers had missed.
The song references “one day in May“...and now that it is almost May, I feel the grief of missing my dance with the blossoms this year. Another wisp of casual climate sadness. To console myself, I remember the other beautiful things I look forward to during this moon: May Day, Beltane, and my local temple’s Buddha’s Birthday (aka, hanamatsuri).
At our hanamatsuri this past weekend, I got to stand up in the old choir box of the church-building turned hondo. I threw out paper flower petals, raining down on the sangha like dewfall, in honor of the garden that Queen Maya birthed Siddhartha Gautama, the being who would become the Buddha. The story goes that at his birth, flower petals and sweet tea rained down on the Earth. Listening to the story and scattering the petals reminded me that we don’t usually get to choose our timing; even Queen Maya, mother of the buddha, gave birth unexpectedly, while on her way to her home lands.
It got me thinking: What causes a bloom, a moment of opening? What does it take to instigate the moment of opening to share one’s sweetest perfume with the pollinators and world at large? In my tradition, the answer would involve deep contemplation of the truth of interdependent origination of all phenomena, the perspective that all dharmas (phenomena) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”. The blossom exists because the seed exists, because the bee exists, because the roots run deep. Contemplating this mystery, I began wondering about origins and catalysts.
What is the origin of the word “bloom”?
From the online etymology dictionary:
“Bloom” (flower/blossom) originated around 1200 from Old Norse blóm (”flower, blossom”) and related Germanic roots, ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root bhle-/bhel- (”to thrive, bloom”). It refers specifically to the delicate, peak flowering stage of a plant, unlike “blossom” which implies fruit potential.
The transferred sense, of persons, “pre-eminence, superiority,” is from c. 1300; the meaning “state of greatest loveliness” is from early 14c.; that of “blush on the cheeks” is from 1752. Old English had cognate bloma, but only in the figurative sense of “state of greatest beauty.”
A rose, a flower, a movement, blooms with they are ready. When the causes and conditions come together that make a flower. It takes patience and lucky timing to reach a “state of greatest beauty.”
There are rumors of a May Day general strike-what would it take for pro-democracy movements to bloom out of the irradiated filth of our cultural soil? When would they be ready? What causes and conditions would be the inciting incident for resistance to bloom? I am no botanist, just a flower lover, but I think one crucial part must be desire. The desire to change, transform, become more-than-what-you-were. Blooming is an act of intimate loving expression towards the world outside of the self. A rose blooms when she is ready, and when she wants to.
May the blossoms of May and Earth Day inspire you to bloom yourself. May your ideas and creations pollinate and be pollinated in return. Take care, be well, and may peace and joy fill your heart.
Sources referenced:
https://www.buddhistchurch.org/news/meaning-of-hanamatsuri
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bloom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
A special thank you to musician Marya Stark, whose song “Rose Lineage” contains the exquisite lyric “a rose blooms when she is ready”, a phrase I borrowed in this text