Blossoming

In this episode, we explore how a new blossoming is laying seeds that can provide for a better future for us all

It’s been a rough time for a lot of us, over the past few months, as climate change has hit hard enough for people to start acknowledging that yes, it’s real. Europe and the US going through extreme overheat, with huge bushfires occurring all over the place, and drought hitting hard too. Over here in Australia, we’re having the opposite: unusually cold, and really serious flooding in quite a few places. Not fun.

And we’re still only halfway through the respective season - summer in the north, winter down here. I’ll admit I’m concerned about how our summer down here will pan out, given that there’s an all-too-real fire-hazard from the mini-forest that\’s just downslope from this house. With a really wet winter, the grass has been flourishing in all the wrong ways, setting up for a worryingly-large fuel-load underneath the trees: it’s looking scary indeed…

And yet it also feels like another kind of turning-point - a much more optimistic one. As if things are quietly blossoming at last. Literally so, down here in the south right now:

Once we remember to notice, we’ll see that there’s blossom just everywhere at this time:

And the same is happening in the human world. Once we remember to notice, we’ll see that there’s blossom just everywhere at this time.

Caught up in our own troubles, it’s so easy to easy to miss that blossoming - to miss the beauty and the hope that’s expressed in that blossoming.

Yes, I know there’s strife and struggle aplenty right now - and yet, through all of that, there’s still a blossoming of new ideas, new skills, new options.

Yes, I know that blossom soon fades and falls away. It always does. But if it’s been fertilised, it leaves behind a new seed - and from that seed will grow new life. It’s what then grows from that seed that matters.

So how do we find that new blossom - that blossoming of new ideas? One way, perhaps, would be to learn how to notice small things of small quiet beauty…

What do we need to do to ensure those new ideas are made fertile, to develop into new seeds? What conditions- what microclimate of its own - will that seed need, in which to grow into fullness? And what will grow from that seed, that will help us with the challenges and changes that we’ll face from now on?

I’ve done what I can here to grow and sow some seeds for change: it’s never enough, but I’d trust that it’s at least a start. Yet what’s blossoming in your own world? What seeds are starting to show? And what will you do with those seeds, to help those ideas spread?

Our world needs our help: and now is our time, and our responsibility, for the blossoming.

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