My secret garden was both surprised and yet, in it’s deepest deep, was not surprised at all. It knows how the world turns and wakes us with ways that challenge and delight. I knew it was bound to be cold this night, so I carefully laid a cover of warmth over the small seedling bed of greens. Only yesterday I was digging the trenches for the potatoes to nestle in, and I cut and lay out the seed potatoes for drying so that today they could go in the ground. I imagined a different day today somehow…on this day of our first community market where seeds and plants were to be sold. This cold and snow may kill some of these young sprouting ones, or halt the permission given to others to break through into shape and form and push for the light. There are so many things that get in our way on the path of the new. And yet for others…for the seed shapes that still wait in some kind of misunderstood hesitation in earth, perhaps this late snow fall and thick grey sky, may be providing exactly what that one needs.
We are all ground for possibility and yet the mystery of what comes through into visibility and what stays in the invisible realm is some alchemical equation of magic that we will never understand. Our personal will undeniably plays a part, but it is certainly not the all of it.
We dwell in a world of relationality with all things…we all affect each other…each event…each being…each shift in the cosmological unfolding effects us, whether we know it or not. SO when our mind has a particular plan with time modules and exact start and end dates, it is often triggered by the fact that there is another far greater plan that is actually directing…or perhaps allowing the way of the world to show us it’s way.
I see this in my world of “release/sabbatical” with my mind’s idea that this would last 7 months and then suddenly I’d be swept up again in the world of work and have a beautiful new ambition and task and an income would be again flowing in. Well, from this perspective of 5+ months in, it’s not really looking that way.
I feel myself to be, as Joseph Campbell puts it, in the belly of the whale….a kind of world womb…or cocoon. So much of who I’ve known myself to be has dissolved and gone into question. I find no shape that I know as me…I am in a place I’ve not known before and there is not yet even a dreamed of form that tells me when or how I might emerge. I am, like those tiny seeds just under ground, feeling the snow’s weight and again darkness laying over me, in question as to when or whether I will emerge from this place of darkness.
Our culture has evolved to a place that has a very difficult time accepting this approach to life for humans….the approach that allows mystery a place and cycles their time. It is not only my own inner judgements and fears that surround me, but the world’s as well. Our minds want a schedule and our bookkeeping wants income. But as my sister, Susanna is now asking as a “world view” CPA….what really IS of value? what puts a black mark on the page that will carry us forward? And what causes a red mark that could sink the whole darn ship?? We have placed our trust in dollars and yet, it is precisely that that seems to have put us into a place of undoing in the world.
And so I bring myself back to the heart of my secret garden and look there to trust this excursion into ‘becoming seed.’ I can only echo earth and lay my trust in it’s illimitable cyclic wisdom.
How can I be separate from that?
Let the snow fall and let me trust it’s purposeful place.