blossom and bare
During midday writing breaks, I walk with Dory around the ranch house to the cattle guard and back. Some days, I bring her orange rubber ball along with us. After running with the ball in her mouth for a few minutes, ears flapping behind her, Dory will inevitably drop the ball to search for a stick.
Stick secured in her mouth, she turns to me to play an odd iteration of soccer that we’ve invented. She wants me to kick the ball, and I do. She runs alongside it, tail wagging, mouth held open in a grin by the stick. She might dribble the ball with her feet for a beat, but usually she just runs further up the road while looking back expectantly: she wants me to kick it again. We travel the road this way—I kick the ball, she runs along and then away from it, I catch up to the ball, I kick it again.
Dory could play this game for hours, but usually after fifteen minutes or so, the next thing on my to-do list creeps into my awareness and I turn back towards the house.
Today, as I turned, an accumulation of white flowers burst into view: the first flowers of the plum tree! The trunk splits into three limbs just a few feet from the ground, then branches into smaller limbs that twist towards the sky. These flowers have bloomed on a single limb, the other branches still bare or just beginning to bud. Like how one cloud appears in the sky, seemingly from nowhere, and the others build around it.
Just as the aspen in fall teaches us that we change in stages, the plum tree in spring reminds us that we reveal our beauty in phases. We bloom in our own time, and sometimes we bloom though parts of us remain bare. Like the tree couldn’t wait for the rest of herself to catch up—like she had to put this beauty into the world.
I love this gentle reminder, to let what feels emergent come forth, though the rest of us is bare. To not withhold our beauty. A reminder that we contain multitudes: we can be blossom and we can be bare.
And in fact, we blossom from bare. What looked barren just yesterday has sprung into life. Change, like beauty, can shift overnight.
Writing Prompt:
What feels emergent or ready to bloom in your life?
What are you withholding?
Where can you allow part of yourself to bloom, though the rest of you feels barren?