Bloom Time

When I was little, people used to call me an old soul – maybe because I enjoyed quiet, reading, and adult conversation, maybe because I had language and discernment for complicated things, like emotions. I often felt out of step with peers and was very fortunate in the relationships I formed with wise adult teachers. As I got to be college age, though, my mother started to refer to me as a late bloomer. And it was true that I didn’t have the slightest idea where I was headed career-wise. I started as a music major, because I could sing, but had terrible stage fright and didn’t think I would ever be able to perform, given that the breath essential to singing is quite dysregulated when I’m terrified. I changed my major to English because I could write, but didn’t think I would ever be able to teach, as it also involved being up in front of people.

Thanks to a workshop my mother led, however, I did come to an understanding of life purpose that has helped to guide me through various turns and crossroads in my journey – that has helped me learn to let my gifts lead me and given me courage to face fears, and is intimately connected to both. My purpose is to help create safer, braver spaces for self-expression. Though I didn’t know it in college, both singing and teaching were in my future – the first an avocation and spiritual practice, the second a vocational calling. Though I was the first in my friend group by far to become a parent, it would take me some years following college graduation to come to an idea of profession as an educator, and then many more years and degrees and certifications to understand just who and what I wanted to teach. At each of these turns, I was often older than my peers – still out of step, but now at the later end. And my mother’s language, late bloomer, helped me to normalize and affirm my experience.

I’ve been watching the sedum path my partner planted along our front walkway this year, enjoying the emergence of flower heads, first a sage-y green, then slowly blushing a pale pink, then a soft coral – then just recently, coincident with the Equinox and Harvest Moon, deepening to the deeper maroon red I love them for. And it’s occurred to me that, while I think my mother had in mind a single blossoming of profession over the course of my lifetime, the flowers we call late bloomers are perennially so. And so really, for them – and maybe also for me – they aren’t really late at all, but actually right on time. And it’s occurred to me that maybe this is the way with a life of contemplation and discernment. Maybe when we feel our way, when we allow intuition to be a guide, when seek to answer a calling, maybe then it takes a little longer. Which is another way of saying we bloom in our own good time.