Before the colors are swallowed up by winter’s quiet dreams, let us give you one more sweep of hues to carry you through the colorless cold. Tuck these bold flags into the corners of your mind. Wave them on nights when the wind howls, when snow pulls its white blankets over your fields. Let them warm you with their bright songs and encourage you when the days seem bleak and endless. Let them whisper to you that winter is but a pulling back of the Archer’s bow so that, come spring, new songs may rise, and joy, renewed, may fill your soul.
You are the essence of gaiety and delight. To stand inside your citron arms is to banish every residue of sadness and every wish for something other than this golden, shimmering now. Your lemon-lime leaves sing the music that my heart has so longed to hear. And I dance to you, oh great one, with my heart dancing to your song.
You can tell me the how of it all that you want, explaining the way the light rays bend around the curvature of the earth, and how their travel through the atmosphere produces all these colors. It doesn’t change things or answer the why. There didn’t have to be beauty. But here it is, glowing, and touching our souls. I say it is a gift, a love note from the Yes, just because.
First comes spring, the great out-breathing of the winter’s dreams. Then summer, the inhalation of light to feed and grow them. Now, autumn, and the out-breath of the earth, carrying its completed forms until the winter rest, the deep inhalation, in whose darkness earth conceives new dreams.
It took only minutes for the accident to unfold. But after it, everything my friend Holly and her husband had known as their life had irrevocably changed. He was okay, but first responders had to help him crawl out of his totaled truck.
At first, there was the shock of it, and then the clearing of debris, the assessment of damage and of what was left. It’s no easy task to figure out what to do with a seriously altered reality. I watched to see how my friends would cope.
“It’s another pit in the road, for sure,” Holly said. “But we have shovels.” Those words were enough to assure me that they would find their way. What she was telling me was, “We can cope. We can do this. We have been through trials before.“
Believing in yourself, in your strengths and your resilience, is the first step in moving forward.
“This is My Life Now”
A couple years ago, a storm demolished much of another friend’s farm. As she worked to adapt to her altered world, she kept repeating to herself, “This is my life now.”
The life she had been living was gone. But her mantra helped her to see, first of all, that her life was still hers, however changed.
Repeating “This is my life now” let her see its changes from a fresh perspective. Instead of surrendering to the situation in hopeless resignation, she realized this altered life was hers to live and welcome, whatever it might hold. She was free to do with it whatever she chose, and she chose to live it as creatively as she could and to uncover all the possibilities it presented.
In the Face of the Unknown
Life can slam the door on our familiar lives at any moment. It brings devastating weather, accidents, illness, loss, betrayal, wrecked plans. But it’s never what happens to us that counts; it’s how we respond to what happens that matters.
We learn things about ourselves from our trials, about what truly matters to us, about our capabilities and values, about the depth of our faith.
Nevertheless, the shock of sudden and unexpected change can be painful. That’s when it’s important to remember that HOPE stands for “Hang On, Pain Ends.”
As the pain of shock lessens, we begin to adapt to our altered reality. We pick up the pieces. We learn to pace ourselves, to conserve our energy, to look for resources, and helpers, and ideas. We learn to be patient; recovery takes time.
The fact is life goes on – even when we wish it didn’t. The direction it goes depends, to a very large extent, to how open we are to seeing that every setback, every obstacle opens the door to new possibilities. The key is to look for what’s good, to draw on our resilience and ingenuity, and to keep on keeping on.
We get to decide who we want to be in the face of the unknown. We can see ourselves as victims or victors, to be overcome by our circumstances or to be one who overcomes them and turns them to good. We can fall into the pit in the road or remember that we have shovels.
Wake up saying, “This is my life now,” and welcome it for all the potential it holds. Then do your best, moment by moment, to squeeze all the juice from the day that you can. Life’s a crazy place. But it holds as much joy as sorrow. Be brave and bold. Dare to claim life’s goodness and beauty. Every day that you get through has its gifts. Every day you’re alive, you’re a winner.
This. To walk in this gold feels a privilege. To hear the crunch of the brush beneath my boots and the whispering of the breeze through the dry dancing leaves, to watch the hawk soar and heaped clouds sail the endless blue, and crimson leaves twirling down from the trees as if their fall were part of some grand ballet. This. Every miraculous detail. Such a gift. Such a priceless gift.
One of the things that the Great Yes wanted to experience was being a maple tree whose leave would turn red in fall. And so it did. And on one perfect October afternoon when the air was cool and the sun warm and shining through its red leaves, the maple danced, and the Great Yes sang from within its very atoms in absolute joy.
A host of lore abounds telling how your coat, dear woolly bear, predicts what winter will hold. The greater the brown, the milder the season; an abundance of black means plenty of snow. Here’s what I know: You’re a sure sign that winter is next, and if I was smart, I’d be digging out woollies of my own.
No matter what life wrote on your pages today, there was this, this maple glowing on the corner of a street somewhere. It was part of today, too, even if you didn’t see it with your own eyes or give it a thought. It was here, radiating its glow, causing a certain light to rise into the air, lifting its song to a brighter scale. It helped hold us up. All of us. And it didn’t even care if any of us knew.
