Saturday, September 8, 2012

Release

The kitchen counter is covered:  a large basket of apples gathered from the ground below the tree suffering from lack of rain and cedar rust, still making fruit that will be cooked into applesauce for small mouths and bodies.  Three large boxes of tomatoes picked from the vine of a friend whose garden last year succumbed to chemical drift and deer; this year her garden truly was a victory.  The woman beside me who holds her new son, the one she prayed and prayed to have when she wasn't sure she could.  The woman with new boots raising her sons and her songs and the place where she belongs; she never stops moving toward these riches.

And Nora running into the double doors of her school, blessed going in, blessed coming out.  I marvel at the size of her adult teeth, delighting in the "beaver" stage all kids her age go through.  I'm watching her talk.  This is a new person I'm meeting every morning, and some mornings we argue over putting on clothes and getting to school on time, and some days we just sit next to each other on the couch, my head on her shoulder, her hand twisting a piece of my hair.  Just being.  She's growing into her size, into her self.  And I am moving through the letting go, sometimes gracefully, sometimes still clinging to the way things were when she was my little one.

And I have been meditating hard on the difference between forging ahead and following.  And I am realizing that in order to follow, one must accept both protection and a new, unimagined life.  This is a mystery I'm still trying to understand.  Let go and come to Me.  In return, the gifts of yielding that space will be abundant.  

From one moment to the next, we are being asked to let go even as I watch the summer garden wilt back to the earth and the trees, already dried from lack of rain, release their leaves early so they might move into the death of dormancy to prepare themselves for next season's waters, the limbs already offering their naked entreaty toward the sky.  Let me live again.


Saturday, September 1, 2012

Trees

Willingness lives somewhere at the edge of the Wilderness, where she wandered to find the light hidden between the limbs (her own?  the trees?), bare feet and branches snapping as she cut her way through to the center of it.  Terrified, she did it anyway.  Like many women, she owned a pair of boots but she hadn't thought to put them on as she was woken from her dream, called out the door, still half asleep, and walking toward what she couldn't name.  God's voice touching in the trees like a mother calming her child, shhhh...shhhhh.  Trust this.

Seeds

She was not negotiating the days of her life in order to find out more about her life, nor was she truly interested in knowing more about herself through the "work" of self-examination.  The difference would be this:  The seed can not be saved if she digs down into the earth with shaking hands to pull it up, examine it, name its parts while at the same time tearing it lose from the dirt that holds the fragile tail of a shoot inside its mouth, warm and dark and necessary.  Speechless.  A seed pulled this way can't be put back into the earth and expected to recover, to grow.  The vulnerability of such a creature (a life, a person, a child) must not be compromised by our desire to possess it or give it a name smaller than the one it was given in the Beginning.

Instead,  she will leave the seed of herself alone, allow herself to show herself in her own time and in the fruit she produces, what she is, what she dreams possible for herself, what she fears, how she moves, how she is called beyond her fear of the dark wilderness of her past, sustaining herself on the desires of her heart written there for her by God, for what she can know of light and air and love because it is being given to her.   She lifts to receive these blessings.  Let her lift to receive these blessings.

Sometimes I am this brave.  Sometimes I am not.  And this is to be expected.