The Tribune

THE royal poincianas are blooming. Some of the tall umbrella-like trees with their extended canopies and smooth grey barks are nearly fully inflamed, commemorated meticulously in the brushstrokes of Bahamian artist Chan Pratt.

Some are slowly offering their blooms after months of seeming rest, filling in slowly as Georges Seurat might a canvas with his impressionistic pointillism.

When in full-bloom, the tree with its dappled shade and spreading branches of mostly deep-red and orange petals will catch up to the early bloomers.

A few boast yellow-flowering cultivars, with “delicate, fern-like leaflets” as a backdrop for the “four spoon-shaped petals about three inches long, and one slightly larger petal, called the standard ... [resembling] orchids.”

Native to Madagascar, the fast-growing evergreen tree is also called flame tree or flamboyant.

The botanical name for the tree is Delonix regia, derived from the Greek words delos (conspicuous) and onyx (claw), both referring to their exuberant appearance.

One gets a sense that the trees recognize their brilliance.

One of the most dazzling trees in creation, the fruit of the royal poinciana is a seed pod which can grow to over a foot long.

Generations of Bahamian children have transformed the pod into a musical instrument and employed its seeds for art work, games and as instruments of mischief, scratching the seeds against a surface, and then stinging friends with the makeshift weapon.

Spring is once again rushing into summer. Even more so during this second year of COVID-19 as vaccines and the desire for greater normalcy are hurtling us to something new and uncertain.

Sometimes we have to force the spring and the summer.

A change of seasons brings new life, new growth, unseen possibilities and sometimes the fitful start of hope.

But what is true for flora often evades the human animal and spirit.

Like all epochal events or periods, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an edge event for most of humanity.

It has shattered many lives and futures.

Many of its far-reaching effects remain unknown.

The pandemic may last many years.

For many, isolated in homes, removed from family and friends and the regular drumbeat of daily life, the pandemic has produced a myriad of psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual rumblings, unease and affects.

The pandemic has induced deep reflection and the surveying of the past and possible future for many who may emerge with the clarity of a new vision for themselves and contributions to their communities and world.

Determined

Some have recognized that their pre-pandemic lives were mere drudgery and routine from which they are determined to break.

Some are emerging from the pandemic with new ideas for life, including in relationships and in the worlds of work and enjoyment.

A dear friend notes that he has let go of relationships which have run a certain course but are no longer fruitful or life-giving.

The pandemic has accelerated the discontinuation of various toxic relationships with former colleagues and friends who, given over to resentments and envy, remain stuck in certain pathologies and patterns.

While many are finding new life despite this season of death and suffering, many will not experience new dawns and life because change is frightening.

All periods of life and the ability to change require an openness to growth.

But growth demands self-reflection.

Introspection frightens the hell out of some people, desperately afraid of what they may discover about their true selves, inclusive of better angels and personal demons.

In the brilliant 1964 film, The Night of The Iguana, adapted from Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name, a female character is about to be confronted with the reality that she is a lesbian.

Before she is about to be confronted, one of the other characters tells the confronter to leave her alone, because the truth about herself would shatter her and that she did not possess the ability to hear more about her motivations and truer self.

Some spend their entire lives with their ears stuffed up, running away from themselves, always seeking distractions and constant avoidance, telling themselves, “Everything is okay.”

A refusal to grow. Frightened by change. Never truly experiencing new life.

This is heartbreaking tragedy.

Throughout his mesmerizing plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the gay, alcoholic Williams never relents in forcing us to look honestly at the conceits, the lies, the pathologies, the repression and the detritus of our lives.

It is easier and less painful to look away from our demons while busily trying to locate and to cast them out of others.

But most of our demons are cleverer than our feeble selves.

Because they are so pernicious and wily, most of us need others to help us to wrestle with our demons.

Our mistakes and faults in life only define us when we are incapable of seeking paths of redemption and growth, when we are afraid to ask for help from friends, from family, from therapists or spiritual directors.

Yearning

Instead, many seek an elusive pleasure-filled happiness, often believing that material goods can satisfy a creature hungry, yearning for something much more, including love and a certain peace despite the disappointments and difficulties of life.

Writing on a BBC website, Nat Rutherford observed: “Self-help books and ‘positive psychology’ promise to unlock that psychological state or happy mood.

“But philosophers have tended to be sceptical of this view of happiness because our moods are fleeting and their causes uncertain. Instead, they ask a related but wider question: what is the good life?”

A part of the good life requires the sort of self-reflection and introspection that allows us to survey and examine our fuller selves and consciousness, our appetites and pratfalls, our gifts and yearning.

To be loved beyond one’s weaknesses and mistakes is one of the most empowering things for a human being.

It is to be loved for oneself.

If we are fortunate, at some point we also come to more deeply love ourselves, opening us to growth and greater true esteem for our human dignity.

But this ability to love oneself more fully, to forgive oneself and to seize the courage and to grow typically requires the help and the support of others from the isolated islands on which we build personal empires of the heart and soul.

Such growth and openness may bring us to new or deeper relationships, new vocations and careers, greater life adventures and possibilities we cannot see when mired in certain patterns of life.

The royal poincianas are blooming.

They are brilliant and exuberant because they remain in an endless cycle of renewal and new life.

They bloom at their own pace but they bloom indeed.

A beloved relative, a nonagenarian, recently stated that he would like to study Spanish again. He is determined to keep growing.

A friend has a rock in her garden on which is painted the encouragement to her plants and to herself, “Grow, dammit, grow!”