Just Show Up

I stepped out of my Aunt’s small house – tucked down under a big tree whose bare branches hung dormant over the thawing landscape – and started along the rain-sodden path to my car. The fading light of the gray Spring day muted everything in the quiet landscape around my Aunt’s semi-rural home, which is situated on the same property as her recently-deceased daughter’s house.

And then I stopped and looked about me.

The property cavorted with treehouse and trampoline, lounging chairs and firepit, woods and foliage, meandering paths and rocky inclines. It held in its jumbled essence the laughing, opinionating, loving, joyful and irascible life of my cousin who had lived there, before passing unexpectedly a few months earlier.

In the gloaming of that day, in the absence of any sign of spring and in the total absence of my cousin’s physical life, I felt presence and spirit and the coming of spring, and my cousin watching over me, her mother and her family with her impish grin.

“Life,” she seemed to say to me in the dusky silence, “will rise again out of this dormant ground. Your life will also rise again out of the dormant, composted material of your sorrows and sufferings. You just need to show up, the way a seed shows up, bursting open underground to feel its way out into the light. Not striving or grasping. Just poking your head out to see how you might bloom in this world, not in SPITE of the compost of tears and pain and loss, but BECAUSE of them.”

Spring is a great reminder to us to resist resenting the darkness from which the seeds of our life’s purpose rise up and instead stay open to discovering new ways to bloom.

Welcome Spring.

Welcome New Day.

Welcome All Possibility.

by Syndie Eardly