slew of words

burgeon – verb – to send forth new growth (such as buds or branches)

“Your main challenge right now is to see change as an opportunity for growth,” my horoscope has been reminding me for a while now. As if I was not already aware, that my problem does not lie in acknowledging change but instead by embracing it. As if I did not notice that my landscape has been drastically altered yet that I have not come to recognize it as my own.

But that is because it is easier, more comforting even, to look at the parts of me that have wilted and wrack my brain for ways to save them rather than to focus on the ones that prosper.

To look at the parts that I have over watered with my energy and my effort, their leaves mushy and weak. To waste tears on how they were not returned or to reason with myself that if I had done even more, put down the right fertilizer, they would have flourished.

To look at the parts that I let become brittle, gasping for sustenance, that have passed the point of no return. The doors I let close, the stems I cut too short, the deprivation from sunlight I let happen. And to desperately try to revive them, too little too late.

It is less challenging to look at, and perhaps learn from, the concrete evidence of what has gone wrong, rather than to find hope in the endings I have not yet experienced.

But there are new buds that are beginning to burgeon and there are blooms that have been overlooked. Ones that proliferate like succulents and take root into the driest, darkest parts of my consciousness only to find sanctuary in my negligence.

They may not have been the florets that were anticipated, but they were the ones that appeared. Like tiny brand new opportunities to right my wrongs and expand further into opposing directions.

Buds that may grow into undiscovered parts of myself, buds that may teach me the proper way to care for them, buds that may branch into the heart of someone else, buds that may support other buds.

Or buds that may shrivel too.

But nonetheless, they are buds that have begun to burgeon, and they deserve a fighting chance.