While sweeping the last of the leaves off the porch today, it registers that another fall is over and winter is beginning to take hold. My yard accepts this change with such grace. The ground hardens and doesn’t crave water anymore. The trees have most graciously let go of their leaves and don’t mind their winter brownness, losing their summer and fall beauty. The marsh turns all kinds of golden hues and doesn’t mind sitting alone after all the wildlife has vacated.
Mother Earth is a gracious women. She not only accepts the change of season without complaint, she weathers the hurricanes and nor’easters with inhuman strength. She sheds barely a tear at the abuse of man. In the face of constant change and battering, she continues to give back. Each spring she gives new life to enable man to feed himself and survive. She recycles her water over and over to sustain life. When we’re wet and cold with rain and snow, she brings forth the sun to warm us. And sometimes, just for a surprise, she stops us in our tracks by painting a stunning rainbow or hanging a brilliant full moon in the sky. She plods on day after day, barely skipping a beat, without a goal or and endpoint.
I think maybe Mother Earth knows the secret to living a fulfilled life. She knows the heart of life is like a great big white water rafting ride. When you sign up to go white water rafting, your goal isn’t the end of the trip. It’s letting yourself float contemplatively through the calm parts and holding on tight as you negotiate the rapids, and praying – praying hard you don’t flip the thing!
In the end, it all comes down to grace. The grace with which you accept pleasure and pain, acceptance and rejection, sheer joy and sadness, as you maneuver your raft day after day. And if by chance you do flip it, go back to your center. Look within. Then move forward with grace. Right your raft. Accept it and float on eagerly awaiting what’s around the next bend in the river. Do this, as Mother Earth does, day after day, without looking for an endpoint, because it is only today that life’s journey is truly about.
And so, as another day goes by, I think tomorrow I may clean the inside of the house and see where that takes me, and….I have written.
*this blog was inspired by a question posed to me yesterday by my good friend, Holli Hartman. Thank you, Holli, for, as you have for the past 4 years, keeping me on my toes and thinking! I love you, girl!
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