It looks like spring outside my windows, or at least like it will be here soon. The flowering quince is starting to bud. The daffodils are blooming. They were covered by a few inches of snow last Sunday, but don’t look too worse for the wear now. They seem to have popped right back up.
Yes, spring is on the way. Outside, anyway.
But inside me, in my inner world?
Not so much.
If I had to label the season that I am feeling inside, I’d have to say autumn, the time when leaves are falling and flowers are going to seed and things look like they are dying, but it is autumn, and it is supposed to be that way, so you don’t worry about it too much. Apparently, my life seasons do not necessarily correspond to what is going on in the natural world.
It would be nice if spring always ushered in new life and resurrection, but right now it feels like it is bringing endings. Goodbyes. New layers of grief to work through. I am not a fan of this. I sure would love an entire season of hope and newness that arrived like clockwork on the same night that we have to set the darned clocks forward, or at the very least by Easter morning.
Sadness and daffodils. They don’t seem like they go together.
But I am reminded (again) of my favorite priest Richard Rohr and how he believes that “the path of descent is the path of transformation” and that “darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers.”
Rohr writes, “Death and life are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath.”
Trust the dying.
Not a saying that would ever show up on a decorative pillow or cozy blanket at HomeGoods, but maybe one that I should copy and post on my bathroom mirror. It might also make a nifty tattoo, although probably not one that would ever be very popular.
Anyway. Trust the dying.
This is certainly not the way that I would have set things up, if I was in charge.
Thankfully for all of us, I’m not in charge.
I am trying to trust the dying, to be a “willing and happy traveler,” as Rohr says, “on a train ride that is already in motion,” one where death is transformed, not avoided.
Spring will come, I know. It will be lovely when it does. When the time is right. Just not yet. Not quite yet.
