Is there anything as precious as blossom? Its arrival in spring catches the deep feeling that words don’t reach. The great happening that occurs with the cherry, for example, is beloved especially of the Japanese who even arrange to have picnics under its flowering branches. So, we have Basho’s tender haiku in which he catches the humour and wonder of people finding wind-blown blossom in their soup and salad.
In his poem ‘From Blossoms’, Li- Young Lee imagines how in eating a peach one is also eating the blossom and the shade, the fellowship and the orchard. On such days of awareness, death, he suggests, seems to lose its foothold and there is only joy and the movement ‘from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom’. You can almost hear in its repetition how delightfully the word appeals to him, how it hesitates before the ecstasy it can’t contain.
‘Blossom’ is our word for attempting to name the unnameable, a tree in flower, the divine mystery revealing itself in earth’s unfolding. And we are part of it all.
The ancient ritual of bowing to another still has resonance in eastern cultures. At its core is the recognition that what is divine in me recognises the divine in you. It is one of our most fragrant gestures. When applied to the natural world, our bowing addresses the inner life of the tree – ‘You are beautiful’- and is reciprocated.