Today my magnificent magnolia is all but bare of leaves in the winter cold, but just a month ago it was flourishing and prolific with flowers. It occurs to me that magnolia's must flower in spring in the northern hemisphere, and mine keeps faith with that timing in the southern hemisphere but is then driven by the cold into winter and leaf loss. A case of mistiming. It does flower in the brief period that passes for spring here, but nothing like the magnificence of its autumn show.
It makes me consider faithfulness on one hand and inflexibility on the other.
It is faithful to its "programming" and flowers when magnolias flower. Just as in the heat of summer we in the south are faithful to the Christmas story with its winter images. Christmas to us usually means summer thunderstorms and baking heat and humidity, very alien to much of the imagery portrayed on European and American TV and in books. None the less we celebrate Advent and the Christmas Feast with as much joy and splendour as anywhere else in the world, observing the same liturgy as Catholics anywhere do. Much as my magnolia celebrates life by flowering in the autumn.
Yet, fortunately it is a grafted tree and so not expected to reproduce itself. The winter cold would kill off any seedlings that grew out of the bountiful autumn flowering. Perhaps inflexibility is not the right word, but a lack of adaptability to a different situation. The tree doggedly pursues its rhythm even when that seasonal rhythm makes no sense. I reflect this morning that sometimes I am like my magnolia and that I can't get in sync with the seasons, flowering when it is right and losing my leaves when the cold winds blow.
Funny how the traditions of one culture (like Christmas in winter for the northern hemisphere) can influence how one thinks the tradition ought to be...maybe the Magnolia tree is just wiser than we humans and recognizes that there are deeper influences to life and what it means to bloom, than tradition would have us believe?
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