Bloom Where You’re Planted

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. (Anaïs Nin)

The other day I walked past a darling little sprout; some unidentified seed had landed in a hole the size of a quarter in the driveway, and there this minuscule speck of potentiality pushed forth three or four bright green leaves that caught my eye via their sharp contrast with the surrounding hardscape. (In all honesty, I can’t imagine it having much of a future.) But the point is, it followed an ancient and irrepressible mandate to bloom where it was planted, or, more aptly, had randomly landed. It did not decide to wait for a better location; more sun, perhaps, or better soil. It grew because that’s what it was programmed in its DNA to do.

As a rule, we humans have more choice about where and how to put down roots. But what are we programmed, in our DNA, to grow into? How do we choose the terrain? If our ideas of who and what we are here to achieve, or be, are seeds, what seeds do we want to cultivate? What ideas of success, achievement, worth and value do we subscribe to? I imagine the latter are arbitrary; different strokes — or seeds, to continue the analogy — for different folks. But I wonder how much thought we really put into what we are doing, where we are going, and why. What influences do conditioning, peer pressure, media and other outside factors have on the roles we are enacting? And if we’re not the authors of the script we are following, who or what is really in control of our lives? Which choices are “freely” made and which are driven by unconscious programs, mechanical habits and unexamined beliefs? What is authentic to me and what is a product of FOMO-esque conformity?

You’ve heard it said (as I quoted a couple of blogs ago) that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Think about it. Is that true? Is it possible that we have spiritual DNA, too? And if we do, how does that factor into the terrain in which we choose, or are chosen, to “bloom”? How do we know if we have other, soul or spiritual growth goals? Even imperatives? Is it sufficient to have even a vague sense of something greater, higher, deeper or simply “other” than the success stories that we have subscribed to? And what would it mean to commit oneself to this “other” agenda?

I think of the Goethe poem about commitment, in which the famous sage writes that: “the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too”. What does he mean by Providence? If I commit myself to cooperating with my soul journey or purpose, am I in a dance with an invisible partner that some call God, Allah, Jehovah, Zoroaster or a host of other names for “that which goes by no name”? Let’s face it, it’s complicated!

From experience, though, what I know for sure is that when I seek, I find. When I ask, I receive. And when I knock, Providence or whatever you want to call it, responds. And that dialogue, that call-and-response, is what I am drawn, by my soul DNA, to follow.

And you? What are you drawn to? And what’s stopping you from blooming?