Late blooming often starts with a burning of the fields

Why late blooming?  This title comes what I've learned about the burning of the field before coaxing forth new shoots. 

Four years ago, I was living in a cedar-shingled house overlooking the San Francisco Bay with my husband, a tweedy rare book dealer, and a skateboarding stepson. At the time, I earned my living coauthoring books with charismatic CEOs. 

This was already my second life—after a varied career as a journalist, activist and seminar leader, I was reveling in my Eden of domestic bliss. For ten years, I gardened, decorated, and made elaborate family dinners while working with my clients and editing my husband’s books.  When I finally decided to tackle my novel, the Great Recession hit. Our income tanked as my stepson was heading off to college.  So we decided to pull up stakes and leave the Bay Area.  The day our house went on the market, I was diagnosed with cancer and had no idea how much future I had left.

Six weeks after my (blessedly successful) surgery, we packed up the van and headed to Northampton, Massachusetts, just in time for a tornado, an earthquake (in New England!), and a record-breaking blizzard. On Christmas Eve, my husband left me for a woman he barely knew.  For the next year, I worked my through shock and rage and utter helplessness, wondering how I’d ever manage to feel sane and whole again.  

It took another three years—and another wagon train back to California to write and reconnect with my beloved friends—to realize that "there is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story."

    

Late Blooming is what happens after dieback, after that season of relinquishing, after the burning of old growth.  

Of course, this process isn’t always so dramatic. Still, everyone copes with some version, perhaps involving a work transition, a changing marriage, financial concerns,  health issues, or the shock of empty nest. While more people than ever are going through this rite of passage—an estimated 76.4 million baby boomers here in the US alone—it's curious that we still don’t have a proper name for it.

The same sociologist who invented the term “adolescence” in the early 1900s called the time after we have finished raising our families and establishing ourselves in our professions “Indian Summer.”  Not bad.  This evokes the golden sunset, viewed from a comfortable bench. 

Autumn has always been my favorite season and perhaps that’s why I’m so fascinated by the stage of life that’s named for it.  But I'm not interested in the fading light--no matter how pretty a glow it leaves.  Instead I want to focus on the energy rising in a single organism, from roots to shafts to  shiny leaves.  I'm fascinated by the untamed trajectory of unexpected growth, the sheer brazenness of late blooming.  Of ripening a second time.

In my part of northern California, autumn is the bright red flame of Japanese maple and Western redbud and blazing torches of Witch Hazel.  It’s also a time for baby-blue eyes and red poppies, for meadow foam and a candy-striped flower called "farewell-to-spring"--hardy California natives that do well in a year of drought. 

If you examine your own life, chances are you’ll discover some new plant that’s trying to sprout.  For me it was the call to explore the possibilities open to us as we move through this transition.  

Boomers are approaching these Late Blooming years like no other generation has before.  We are beginning to redefine our work and align our values with the marketplace. At the same time, we are discovering new depths of feeling, new reservoirs of strength and authenticity in our inner lives.

Naturally, this kind of flowering doesn’t happen on its own. We must put on the gloves and kneel down in the dirt and prune away the overgrowth. As Kipling once remarked,  "Gardens are not made by singing, 'Oh how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade."  No matter where you start, late blooming must be treated as an art, an avocation, a kind of sacred calling.

Today's exercise: What portion of your life do you need to prune back because it has overshadowed or overpowered other plants?   What portion do you need to tend like a faithful gardener, without knowing what kind of blossom it may produce?

Check back here to learn more about the magic of late blooming and how best to prepare the ground.