Still More Blossoming

From the Beauty & Truth section in the September 2026 edition of "Loving Intention Connection"

Last week, I took a much overdue walk. It was a gorgeous day and I was so grateful to be out in it and to be moving my body.

On the walk, I went through Bellevue Beach Park. This park is meaningful to me because it is essentially where I spent the beginning of this lifetime. 

My paternal grandma had a house where this park now stands, and because my parents were teenagers when they had me, we all lived there until my parents got their first apartment. When I was brought home from the hospital, I was brought to the house here on this land.

In the park, there is a stunning, enormous tree with whom I have always felt a kinship. I like to think of it bearing witness to my dad’s early life, and my consequent, unplanned arrival. 

When I did a 365 Project called, Trees Please, where I paid homage to trees in one art form or another for an entire year, the project spawned a jewelry line. As I was trying to figure out how to display the jewelry at shows, I ended up taking fallen branches from this tree and using them as a display. That was 14 years ago. This tree and I have history. Just look at this beauty.

I have always loved trees but it wasn’t until recently that I started placing my hands on them for a form of energy exchange. I always feel self-conscious doing this because I have my eyes closed and probably look a bit odd.

On the day of this walk, I was approaching the tree and knew that I wanted to stand in communion with it for a few minutes. However, because there was someone sitting on the bench closest to the tree and I didn’t want to be a blatant weirdo, I walked around to the side of the tree. 

As I stood with my hands on the tree, I closed my eyes and opened myself up to any energy that the tree wanted to give me and offered it to take anything that it wanted from my own energy. 

The energy that I feel when I do this feels very grounding. I feel a resonance most strongly in my feet. It doesn’t feel vibrating but it does feel vibrational (if that makes any sense?). Because I felt self-conscious, I stood like that for less than a minute. When I opened my eyes, I was startled to see this curious beauty walking up the tree right by my hand!

This was clearly a cicada but I had never seen a green one before! I immediately turned to Google and learned that cicadas are green immediately after molting. Sure enough, a quick look at the tree revealed two shed skins attached to its bark. Also according to Google: “seeing a fresh, green, newly molted cicada symbolizes absolute rebirth, vulnerability, and a pure new start. Because its soft green body appears right after it sheds its old shell, it represents stepping out of an old life and into a fragile, tender phase of high spiritual growth and awakening.”

Spot on.

And, wow. 

(Don't even get me started about my connection with my dad and cicadas!)

Gratitude flowed through me. Tears filled my eyes. What an incredible gift.

As I continued my walk, the next street that I walked down was the street where my grandma later lived, Eden Avenue. It was on this street where I was outside halfheartedly playing while my mom and grandma were at the hospital with my dying dad. It was April 23, 1979 and I saw them come home early. I just knew. We all went in the house as they told us that my dad had died.

Often, when I walk this street, I send love to that sweet, silly 12 year old me. I send her encouragement. I send her reminders that he would never leave her, even if it all appears to the contrary. I reassure her that everything is going to be okay.

On this day, I sent these reassurances to her on the sidewalk where she stands frozen in time holding a ball, watching the car pull up, and to everyone in that darkened room, crying because the unthinkable had happened. He was so young. He had only turned 29 years old two days before.

As I was sending this love, I was struck with having newfound words for what I lost that day. I was able to think and to feel something that previously my little girl grief had rendered too difficult to put into words. It felt as if I had reached a deeper level of healing because I was finally able to see that I had lost my protector, the person who had instilled in me a deep and abiding love of music, and a true appreciation for the peace and quiet found in nature on the early mornings when he took me fishing. In that moment, I was able to give words to unnamed grief and it felt like a deep honoring of little me and her pain.

My feet kept walking. As I headed up the several blocks to the house where we lived at the time on Division Street, I received another powerful message about growth.

Since, I hadn’t been on my walk for quite some time, the last time I saw these hibiscus flowers, they were still in buds. Now they were in full bloom.

As I paused to appreciate them, I heard the message, “within the blossoming, still more blossoming.” I looked closer.

The pistils looked like their own tiny flowers, their own blossoming. I continued seeing this reminder on the remainder of my walk.

My wish for you, for us all, is that we are able to pause and take joy in the signs and beauty all around us, that we may find the unnamed words to speak our wounds, and that we recognize and celebrate our blossoming,

and our still more blossoming.