The sun was sending shafts of thin, hazy light that filtered through the now leafless tree canopy as I walked towards the science building for my first class. My head was occupied by a tangle of disparate thoughts about matters large and small until I was pulled out of my inner dialogue by a sudden warm golden glow emanating from hundreds of different points on a shrub to my left. Momentarily confused - all the ephemeral golden hues of the sugar maples, hickories, and elms had long since tumbled to the ground - I finally realized that the pleasant warmth of these colors was not coming from late autumn leaves but, almost miraculously, from golden FLOWERS that had recently emerged in profusion despite the late November chill in the air.
Indeed, the Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) was blooming again. Small clusters of bright yellow flowers adorned the many stems of the shrub in front of me, with each flower displaying four, long, uniquely twisted, ribbon-like petals, four golden sepals, four stamens, and two short styles in the center of each flower. The shrub's leaves were no longer on the branches, having recently fallen to the ground with the leaves of most of the other deciduous woody plants around (save some of the oaks), but in their place, the shrub had exploded into a riot of weird, twisting flowers.
"It's never too late to bloom..." I thought to myself, and the Witch Hazel in front of me seemed to dance a little as if in acknowledgement of my recognition of this fact in front of me, clear as day. Witch Hazels have always known this, I gather, as they are the latest blooming woody plants in Eastern North America, with flowers emerging in late November and even December, often accompanied by snow flurries and biting winds.
And here, again, is another lesson from the wise plants all around us. Drinking in the flowers before me, I realized that, left to their own devices, beings mature and develop at their own paces, at their own times, in their own ways, unbothered by irrelevant external expectations. I think more humans could heed this lesson, as I've seen many of my friends and acquaintances seem to accept the relatively uninspired life of middle-aged-ness in late stage capitalism. I feel like many of us abandon the possibility that we can learn new skills, develop new passions, and bloom in our own uniquely beautiful ways as we get older. It's never too late to write that poem or that song or that play. It's never too late to learn how to work wood into beautiful forms. It's never too late to learn how to speak your ancestors' native tongue. It's never too late to take up landscape photography or to learn how to play the piano, the electric bass, the trumpet, or any of the wild profusion of drums humans have created since time immemorial. What seems to hold us back are narratives we've accepted about the mainstream expectations for people living in our time and place, conditioned by the many real, and sometimes limiting, external factors that shape our lives. But in spite of all of that, I think that the Witch Hazel's golden blooms in late November remind us that, indeed, "It's never too late to bloom...and to add a little bit of our own unique beauty to the larger world."
Though Witch Hazel has many gifts to give us, including the tannins that it produces in its inner bark that have many useful astringent and hemostatic properties, perhaps the most valuable one is the symbolic gift of knowledge that beauty develops at its own pace; that "too late" is an arbitrary designation when it comes to human development and experiences; and that all of us are constantly evolving, growing, learning beings that have much beauty to add to the world if only we allows ourselves the time and permission to create it.
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