The Grace of Change

No Shit, No Flowers

The Wonderful Husband received an generous gift from a landscape design client several months ago: 6 bags of aged, weed-free steer manure. Wow.

A gift, you ask?

Well, yes, in the right context ;-)

Several weeks ago David and I were happily putzing in the garden. One thing led to another, and in two shakes of a mockingbird’s tail (as Mama used to say) we were digging in the front and creating a real garden there for the first time. We transplanted hellebores, violets, and maples from the back garden and, along with still-potted plants David had collected over the years, created a lush new landscape.

What a gorgeous garden we created! As I’m writing this, I’m looking out on a lushness of blossoms: crimson rhodies and azaleas, creamy dogwoods, chartreuse hellebores, purple labrador violets.

We mixed said manure in all the new beds. I’ve never used bagged manure in a garden, and I was surprised to see and smell how, er, recognizable it was.

As I was digging, I remembered a client many years ago in Big Change. Elaine was a gardener, too, and we played with metaphors from nature to help ground her grief and deepen her trust in the cycles of death and rebirth in nature and in life.

One week Elaine came in all smiles, a miracle given the depth of her losses. “Melissa,” she grinned, “I’ve found the key!”

For a New Beginning

  For those of you celebrating new change, and for those of you sooooooooo ready for new change.

 
What I love about this poem is how O'Donohue emphasizes the mystery of Rebirth. Few of us, at the beginning of Rebirth, received a detailed 10 year plan of how our life will unfold. Rather, it's like the very beginning of spring: new tender shoots, sometimes unidentifiable. Sunny and warm one day, snow or miserably cold rain the next.

 

To Rebirth:

For a New Beginning
 
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
 
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
 
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
 
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
 
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.
 
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
 
~ John O'Donohue ~

What Doesn't Change, In Change

This is one of my favorite poems to read aloud toward the end of a retreat on big life transitions...

...mmm, I love the hushed and fertile quiet of a group of women listening deeply, with the ears of their hearts, to a good poem.

In a big transition, so much of what we "knew" about the world — our assumptions and beliefs about ourselves, about life, about relationships and others — goes away, never to return again. Given this, it is life-giving to reflect on what doesn't change, that thread you follow no matter what:

THE WAY IT IS

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford

So what is your thread that you don't let go of, despite changes and how hard it might be for others to see? How does it keep you from getting completely lost?