On What It Means to Bloom Again

I've been quietly counting out six years. When I heard that AKMU had put out a full album for the first time in six years, I found myself standing for a long while in front of the title, 'Flowering'. It's a single word, and yet the length of time folded up inside it isn't easy to measure. For some people, six years is long enough for a whole chapter of life to change over completely. When spring comes the world turns noisy with talk of flowers, and yet hardly anyone stops to wonder about the time that flowed beneath the soil before that flower ever became one. So before I read this news as a story about arriving, I wanted to read it first as a story about holding on.

The Time That Always Comes Before Blooming

To flower is simply for a blossom to open. But before a flower can open, a long stretch of time has to be laid down ahead of it. The seed pressed into the soil, the whole of winter when, on the surface, nothing at all seems to be happening. Because we can't see it, we're quick to call it a 'standstill,' and yet down beneath the ground the roots were surely reaching out, little by little, and the paths for water were quietly opening. The season when nothing seems to be happening might, in truth, be the busiest season of all.

I suspect the six-year blank was a time like that. From the outside it looks like a full stop, but inside, something is quietly ripening. We only ever see the flowering up on the stage, but what pushed that flower upward were the unseen seasons offstage.

The Seasons We Called Stagnation

Our own lives have times like that too. A stretch of stagnation with nothing much to show for it, while everyone else seems to be pulling far out ahead. Standing right in the middle of it, your heart keeps hurrying, because it feels as though this time won't lead anywhere at all. And it feels that way all the more on the nights when you line yourself up beside other people and you're the only one who hasn't moved.

But once it's behind you, you come to understand something. That without that time, the you of today wouldn't exist either. Flowering doesn't arrive out of nowhere one day; it's the result of unseen time piling up and up until at last it's pushed out into the open. That season that seemed to drag on so slowly was, in fact, the one working the hardest. Come to think of it, maybe 'stagnation' is a name we pinned on a little too hastily, too.

Even If Nothing Blooms Right Now

So even if nothing seems to be blooming this very moment, it's all right. A season without flowers isn't the same as a season where nothing is growing. We want to confirm the results with our own eyes, and yet the things that matter usually begin somewhere we can't see.

Sometimes, when I stop on a night walk, I can feel that a branch not yet in leaf is getting ready for the next season even there in the dark. On the tip of that bare branch, a spring with no name yet is hanging quietly. Maybe you, too, are in the middle of getting ready to bloom just like that. There's no need to hurry. What is meant to open will open in its own season, and in the end, it all comes to 'Flowering'.