I wonder if the blossom is really more blossomy this year or if I am just more open to its beauty and its message? The further I go on this trail of paying attention to trees the more I am convinced that the they are our partners in many ways, benevolent witnesses of our human life trying very hard to help us. All we need do is to slow ourselves and pay closer attention to their wondrous tramsmission of life force!
This deep atunement they offer to us is available to anyone who is open to it.
Blossom season is one of my favourite times to witness the trees making an incredible effort to get out attention and pull us out of our energetic slumps, our distracted trances. We have imagination and heart space - trees have blossom - its a perfect arrangement. Beauty needs something to witness it, and humans can do this! And then, if I open, suddenly, I am arrested by a fully blooming tree stood before me - Bang!!! I'm awake, I'm present, I'm fully here and alive exactly where I am. Just breathing and being!
The rewards are plenty when I spend time present to trees in blossom. I am offered uplift; levity; an inner cleansing. The qualities of blossom offer themselves to my imagination. Please recive this little moment spend in the sound garden at Avoncroft museum in Warwickshire, England.
I am clearly not the first to receive these delights! Have you ever taken a look at the work of Cicely Mary Barker and her flower fairies? Well this blossom-time is when the whole lightness and giddiness of imagining into the fairy realm makes the most sense - it is utterly light and open-hearted to possibilities and to the new life Spring brings our way! And you really dont need to be a six year-old girl to appreciate this!
Speaking of humans, have you noticed that a few people actually have these very blossom-like qualities? You might know one - They are light and bright and approach life with a profound gentleness and lightness of touch. This is not an easy path to walk through life and yet these people go through life stepping very lightly on the earth and assuming little. I am blessed to have several of these folk as friends and my life is richer for them. My blossom friends are also some of the strongest people I know.
If you are a SoulCollager or a Deep-Mapper, I invite you to make a card for blossom, or to Deep-map the blossom in your square mile. Journal with the question - 'What is blossom's message for you today? And if you would like to learn about either of these gentle tools for reflection and self-care, please do be in touch with me about having a session at The Soul Shed
or come along to our next Free community gathring, about Deep-Mapping in your own spuare mile this season.
I would love to conclude with the poem, 'From Blossoms' by Indonesian poet, Li-Young Lee, and a photograph of cherry blossom taken by my friend, Abi Collins. I wish you a joyous Blossom Season:
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
