🥀❤️‍🩹🌹 What Wants to Bloom From This Grief — exploring how loss and change can seed new growth

What Wants to Bloom From This Grief

Grief strips us bare, but sometimes it also plants something new.

The garden keeps showing me how to hold grief gently. It reminds me to move slowly, to listen closely, and to tend what is living instead of only mourning what was lost. Even when nothing is blooming, something is always working beneath the surface. I am learning to trust that rhythm.

However, there are always surprises to find in the garden! My rosemary plant started blooming just before the cold came. I almost missed it. She’s small, growing in a one-gallon pot, but she gave me soft purple flowers anyway. I brought her inside last night. The temperature has been dipping into the thirties, and she’s still adjusting, but she’s holding on.

My rosemary plant bloomed just before the cold came, then moved inside and continued anyway—growth showing up in unexpected soil.

Yarrow is doing the same in the garden bed. Her blooms are long gone, but her green leaves are still bright against the snow. I haven’t covered her, and yet she stays. She’s a reminder that some things endure quietly, even when the season says they shouldn’t.

This time of year always brings grief forward for me. Not just the fresh grief, but the older kind. The kind that sits at the bottom of the well. It rises when the air thins and the garden quiets. I feel it in my body, in my bones, in my breath.

Some losses are clear. Others are harder to name. But either way, the weight changes us. And when the weight shifts ~ even slightly ~ something new can grow.

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Yarrow has been worked with for both healing and protection across North America, Asia, Europe for centuries. In traditional Indigenous, magical and herbal practices yarrow is valued for its power to support wounds, emotional resilience, and boundaries 

When I see her here in my garden under snow and I recognize how grief and growth can coexist. Yarrow’s many cultivated varieties show how life adapts, yet the root characteristics of the species stays and endures. I take that as a lesson: what wants to bloom from grief might not look like what we expect, but it still rises.

Composting the Old, Growing the New

When I look back, I see how much of my life has been shaped by grief that had nowhere to go.

There is grief from childhood. Grief I inherited. Grief I never spoke aloud. I have mourned the loss of people who didn’t fit but still left echoes. I have grieved futures that never arrived. Even now, I sometimes find myself saying thank you or goodbye like it might be the last time. It is how I hold love. It is also how I brace for loss.

But something is shifting.

Beneath all that weight, something new is growing. It is not loud or fast. It feels like slow roots reaching through softened ground. From that heaviness, a whole new life has emerged. One that exists in a different region, with a different rhythm. I tend my garden differently. I approach healing differently. I listen more closely to what is asking to grow.

None of this came without effort. I had to leap. Many times! I had to decide that staying the same felt scarier than taking the risk. I had to let go of what I thought was safety and trust that something would meet me.

And it did.

I am still learning how to live in this season, but I do know this. When self-criticism softened, self-compassion had space to root. When old beliefs broke apart, they made room for something more alive. Even my anger, when composted with care, turned into a will to keep creating. Not because life is easier, but because something in me still wants to bloom.

A Threshold Quietly Crossed

I did not realize I had crossed a threshold until much later.

It was after a long fall and winter marked by loss, marked by Helene. I had laughed until my chest ached with people I had just met, then walked home behind their house in the dark. It was a short walk, but it was enough. I looked up at the soft glow of my own home and realized I was no longer in survival mode.

Even now, as I move through illness, I don’t feel like I am bracing anymore. I feel changed. I feel held. I feel like my body is no longer frozen in the pattern of fear it learned from so many years before. That moment reminded me how deeply shaped I had been by the stress of my previous life. It reminded me how far I had come.

That was not the kind of grief that left me curled up or sobbing. It was the kind that catches in the throat. The kind that sits quietly until it finally loosens and lets you breathe again. The kind that has you stop in your tracks and realize what is no more has been replaced by what is. Sometimes blooming looks like a single inhale that feels spacious after years of tightness.

What Grief Has Grown

There are so many ways grief has shaped me, but it has also seeded new things.

From the loss of my Father, I gained a strange sort of clarity. The absence left space for independence and the freedom to hear my own voice without criticism echoing over it. From losing my home, I gained adaptability. I learned how to dig up what I love and help it survive in new soil. Many of those plants now thrive in my relative’s garden, rooted and blooming.

Even my health has lessons for me.

Hyperthyroidism pushed me to slow down, to listen to my body. That diagnosis felt like a mirror reflecting everything I had been running from. It forced me to rest. It gave me a reason to look at what was hurting beneath the surface. It led me to a slower life, a more tender rhythm, a new way of being. I began to understand that healing my body also meant healing my nervous system. A confronting opportunity to re-evaluate and course correct. To sit with what has changed. It meant healing my relationship to time, to pressure, to proving myself.

That journey was not just physical. It was spiritual. It was ancestral. It was a grief no one else could see but one I had to walk with fully.

And through all of that, a whole new life began to take shape. Not just in theory, but in practice. In a new region. In the daily rhythms of tending the land, sipping tea with the plants, and creating a new kind of home. One where I am allowed to be soft. One where I am not in a constant state of defense.

What the Earth Has Shown Me

Everything I needed to learn about grief, the earth already knew.

It taught me through decay, through the way mushrooms break down what is no longer needed and give it back to the system. It taught me through trees, how they send nutrients through their roots to those that are struggling. It showed me that a forest is not just trees. It is a network. A community. A living system that holds and responds.

Even the plants that thrive after being disturbed have taught me. Some only bloom after being grazed or burned. Others multiply after damage, not because they are unbothered by life, but because they are in relationship with it. That gives me hope.

The death of old parts of me has made way for new ideas, new relationships, new art. Not despite the grief, but through it. It is not that I had to be broken to grow. It is that grief became part of the soil.

Creating Through the Cracks

So much of my art has grown from what broke.

Loss changed my palette. Grief softened my brush. Where I once reached for darkness, now I am learning to layer color again. Not to cover the pain, but to show the whole spectrum of what I carry.

Some of my newest pieces are quiet meditations on connection. Others speak to community, to chosen family, to what I long for in their absence. I have been painting the empty spaces and the ways we hold them warm. I do not always know what the work will become, but it keeps arriving. Slowly. Like spring does. Like hope.

There are works in progress on my desk now. Paintings that ask new questions. They speak of gathering, of remembering, of returning to the table. They are made with the same hands that once trembled with loss, and they are steadying.

Even my metalwork is stirring again. Quietly. No grand plans, just listening. Following the shape of what wants to form next.

The Natural Teachers of Grief

Grief is not just a human experience. The natural world knows it too.

Crows and magpies have been seen mourning their dead, returning to the place of loss with quiet recognition. Elephants touch the bones of their ancestors with care. A deer once stood beside its dying companion in the field behind my home, not moving even after the other had passed. I still think about that moment. I still wonder what was exchanged in that silence. (Read more about that story here)

Even plants respond. Trees share nutrients through their roots with struggling neighbors. Mushrooms fruit after decay, showing only the smallest hint of the vast networks beneath the surface. They remind us that what is unseen is often what connects us most.

There is a wild intelligence in the way nature tends loss. A softness. A ritual.

We are not separate from that. Grief does not make us less natural. It brings us closer to what is real.

Reflection Invitation

What parts of you are still tender with grief?

What new life might be growing quietly underneath?

Is there something or someone you want to honor this season, even if the world does not understand why?

What could it look like to offer a moment of presence, even if you do not have all the words?

Closing Blessing

May the ground beneath you hold what you can no longer carry.

May what is blooming find the strength to keep going.

May you know when to rest and when to begin again.

And may you always feel the pulse of your own becoming, even in the quiet.