I found this snippet in my writing archives yesterday; I wrote it circa 2006, seven springs ago. What I find most interesting about this unedited, journal-esque musing is that it is nearly identical to how I actually experience springtime each year. Despite several major life transitions in the past half decade; despite now residing in a geography vastly different from the one in which I sat as I wrote this piece; despite a stability and peace unprecedented in my life, I feel this same inner landscape experience happening today (just over a week since the spring equinox, incidentally) as much as I did those long years in the past when first I composed this.
My inner waters are like the tides I see ebbing, flowing as my dog and I traverse our favorite local beach. And like the spring buds around me I feel a seed – perhaps dormant for many years but now watered and attended over the last several months of intense inner work – beginning to sprout. Ideas are emerging, insights revealing themselves; I feel emotional. These are all signs that the space that has been cleared for growth is being pushed through with something new. The fertile ground of my soul is being cracked wide open with the pressure of growth from below. I can feel something pushing upward from far within. I can almost, just a-l-m-o-s-t, see the sprout. Certainly the type of bloom, that particular species of change, is not yet something I can identify; I do not know what shape or form this growing sprout will take. Too, it is not a fully comfortable feeling – having this new as-yet-unidentifiable nugget-beyond-a-seed tearing through the layers of inner soil. But I will continue to nurture it and watch it sprout. I do not know how long it will take or what I will be able to do with it. I have no name for it. I am not even sure when it began to sprout.
But what I am assured of is that I want it to continue. I promise to care for it lovingly and diligently. I will honor it by providing shelter, exposing it to the sun, watering it, weeding it. I will even prune it when necessary. What I cannot and will not do is smother, stifle or otherwise inhibit its growth. It has perhaps been waiting since long ago to come forth. I find miracles happening even within myself. How could I squelch the divine?"
The cycles repeat within, seasons in my inner landscape. What does your inner landscape teach you about your own season of spring?
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
