I think the seasons are changing. As a little girl I got a new pair of shoes with each new
school year. We went to the shoe
store in my town where the man would put my foot in a silver measure. He would do both feet just to be sure
they were the same size. I
remember a feeling of being attended to as he remarked on how much I had grown.
The first Sunday in September St. Lydia’s will mark our one
year anniversary. The year has
been one of incredible growth for St. Lydia’s and for me, personally,
professionally and emotionally.
I’ve felt a bit like a neatly tended garden, suddenly left to grow wild
and rampant for a season. Vines
climbing walls with abandon, flowers blooming recklessly, trees dropping fruit,
grasses tangled and overgrown. It
was a year to ignore the voice of fear and the threat of pain, to be undone and
exposed.
But I think the seasons are changing. The light is shorter, the shadows
longer. There’s a smell of change
in the air. Wherever the gardener
went, he’s on his way back now, and ready to restore order to this garden,
clipping and pruning, cutting away what’s unneeded. With him, safely has returned, but there’s a sense of loss
as well. A sense of exchanging raw,
unadulterated growth for a quieter place of imperceptible change.
The garden remembers, though. Even in the dead of winter it remembers a season that came
and will come again, of burdened branches releasing the ripe fruit they carry
to fall, and roll, and lay untouched amid the grasses.
Posted by: |