Blooming

There is something magical about looking forward to the new year. When you sit in a quiet holiday cocoon, quietly dreaming of what you will do and how you will be in the new year, the possibilities seem endless.

When I was looking to the new year, I set Grace as my word.  Grace would be my talisman, following  me around and showing me the way. ln addition to Grace, I also set other goals. Mindfulness. Slowness. Taking care of myself. Being a better friend. Writing more.

With all that goodness in my mind, I set forth in the new year with high hopes.

But then the holidays ended and the new year kicked off. I was immediately back on the tilt-a-whirl of life, holding on tight.  Rather than grace and mindfulness, the past couple of weeks have been full of deadlines, meetings, schedules, tempers, and general grumpiness. Everything feels off. Off because not only is there so much to do, there is also the “new” way in which to do it; a renewed way of living that I am clearly not living into.

Where is the grace in this chaos, I wonder.

As I write this, I can see our forsythia bush outside the kitchen window. This bush is always beating the daffodil's time, announcing spring well in advance of all the other flowers in the garden.

This year, the weather has been unseasonably warm, and the forsythia bush has sprouted a blossom. One beautiful, sweet, yellow blossom. In January.

Pay no mind to the fact it’s blooming two months early, it was this flower’s time to shine. The flower felt it.  It felt the warmth and the rain and it reached down into itself and said, Now. Now is my time. Here I am.

And if I listen to this flower, I can hear it’s wisdom. It’s telling me that my time to bloom is also not mandated by the calendar, but by when I am ready. When I have done the work and felt the sun and stretched and grown and am ready to change.

Here is a quote that I found last year, when I was struggling with some of the same ideas. It’s the words of  the Irish teacher and poet John O’Donahue, who writes:

“The beauty of nature insist on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always captures us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it."

Ah, right. So just as the little forsythia bud is just blossoming when her time is right, we too will blossom with our time is right.  We’ll blossom not because it’s the first weeks of the new year, but because it is our time to bloom. All we need to do is find stillness and pay attention to the “gradual slow beat, always inching its way forward...” showing us the way, until there is no other way of being.