"Bloom!", an open letter by mine
Photo credit: Jenny Schuster
In Full Bloom - Poem
I am a garden.
I am body and vines. I am heart and roots. I am spirit and fruit.
I am living and breathing, and growing and dying,
and growing and dying.
This has been my process.
Toiling over soil, sewing new seeds
Uprooting, cutting, trimming
Watering and waiting,
Watering and waiting.
It is inevitable
The Blooming, I mean
Nature does what it does
So I will do as I do
All of it inevitable
All of it in full Bloom
Explaining Bloom! feels a bit like explaining the seasons. There’s a familiarity there, an understanding - one that is often hard to put into words. It is one thing to sit in a classroom as a young child and learn about the weather and the seasons. It is another thing entirely to experience the changing of fall leaves or the winter in full force (I grew up in North Dakota, so winter and I are all too familiar). Bloom! feels like that to me.
This project is as literal as the title suggests - it’s about blooming and all the other parts of the process that come before and after. It is experiencing the way nature moves and how it shapes both the world inside and around us.
I wrote this EP after coming out of a metaphorically long winter. It was a season in life full of things being let go and even dying, in a sense. At the time, it felt heartbreaking and honestly didn’t make much sense. That was until I started seeing the moments of thawing snow, and I felt the sun creeping back in.
It was then that I started writing. I felt the shift. The hope and promise that something new was coming. Writing this project brought clarity and a new perspective to what had come before and what was to come. Because of course, it did! That is exactly how nature works. There is a process and a system, one that I too am a part of. Each of the songs on this EP reflects some part of that process. Every moment that leads up to the bloom and what follows.
I cannot fully say where I am now. Somewhere in the bloom, perhaps. Or maybe I am still in that never-ending dance that spring and winter do before summer eventually wins out. Only time will tell. However, I can with full confidence say I know what is inevitably to come.