Yellow Before Permission
A tree that doesn’t check the forecast.
I’m in warm water at 7:30 on a Sunday morning and the world is covered in snow. March decided to go backwards. The garden is white. The sky is that pale grey that can’t commit to anything. Everything is waiting.
Except the forsythia.
It’s right there, two metres from the whirlpool, and it’s exploding. Bright yellow on bare brown branches. No leaves. No green. No preparation. Just fire on dead wood in the cold.
I’ve looked at this plant every morning for years. I never asked what it was. Today I asked. my AI and it answered.
The Immigrant
“Like most things that belong completely in European gardens, it’s an immigrant.”
The forsythia is not a tree. It’s a shrub. No central trunk. No hierarchy. Just a dozen stems growing from the base, each one deciding independently to go upward and outward. No leader. No plan. Pure emergence.
It was named after a Scottish gardener who never saw it in the wild. It came from China, Korea, Japan - carried across the world by people who thought it was beautiful enough to bring home. Like most things that belong completely in European gardens, it’s an immigrant. It arrived from somewhere else and made itself so at home that nobody remembers it wasn’t always here.
I know something about that.
Beauty First
Here’s the thing that stopped me this morning.
Most plants follow the rules. Roots first. Then stems. Then leaves. Then, when everything is safe and established and the weather is right and the risk is low - flowers. Beauty comes last. After the infrastructure. After the preparation. After permission has been granted by the season.
Forsythia does it backwards.
“The blooms arrive weeks before the foliage, as if the plant decided that waiting for the proper conditions was a waste of its one short life.”
The flowers come first. On bare wood. No leaves. No green. No safety net. The blooms arrive weeks before the foliage, as if the plant decided that waiting for the proper conditions was a waste of its one short life.
It flowers in March. Not in May when it’s easy and warm and every other plant is showing off. In March. When there’s frost on the ground. When the snow hasn’t finished its business. When every sensible organism is underground, waiting.
The forsythia doesn’t wait. It doesn’t check the forecast. It doesn’t ask the frost for permission.
It just goes.
What Falls Down
And the roots. You can cut a forsythia to the ground and it comes back. You can ignore it for years and it still blooms in March. It doesn’t need your attention. It doesn’t need fertiliser or a plan or encouragement. It needs one thing: to be left alone long enough to do what it already knows how to do.
But here’s the part that got me.
If a forsythia branch touches the ground, it roots. Right where it falls. It doesn’t need to be replanted. Contact with the earth is enough. The branch that falls down becomes the thing that grows.
I’ll say that again because I need to hear it.
“The thing that falls down becomes the thing that grows.”
Bare Wood
I’ve been cut to the ground. More than once. Change. Loss. The kind of nights where you forget what light looks like and the only thing still breathing is the dog on your chest.
And every time, something grew back. Not the same thing. Not a replica of what was there before. Something new, from the same roots, pushing yellow into the cold before the conditions were ready.
I’ve been an immigrant too. Not the tradional border kind. I grew up in Taiwan. Came back to Switzerland as a stranger. Something carried from far away that learned to belong so completely that the garden forgot I wasn’t always here.
I’ve been blooming on bare wood. No infrastructure. No safety net. No leaves yet. Just the colour, first, because beauty doesn’t wait for permission and neither should we.
And every branch that fell - every failure, every collapse, every time I touched the ground - rooted. Became something. Grew.
The Morning
There’s snow on the garden this morning. The sky can’t make up its mind. The water is warm. The coffee is getting cold because I’m talking instead of drinking.
And two metres away, a plant that nobody planted on purpose is doing the only thing it knows how to do. Blooming before the leaves. Yellow before green. Fire before safety. In the cold. On bare wood. Without permission.
I’ve been looking at this plant for years.
Today I finally saw it.
“Beauty doesn’t wait for permission. And neither should you.”
Roman Balzan writes The Burn Blog from wherever the fire finds him. This morning it found him in warm water, looking at a tree that was already on fire before winter finished its sentence.
🔻 Author’s Note
I write to remember. To walk through silence. To burn through the noise.
I also make music under three personas: Naimor (stillness), Nova Rai (fire), and Charlie C (shadow). And I built a framework called Technomysticism for staying human in the age of AI.
The Burn Blog is where I burn. Technomystic.ai is where I build. Both are the same practice: showing up, feeling what’s real, and not looking away.
🎵 Naimor / Nova Rai / Charlie C.
If you feel it, it’s real.