Turning of the Wheel~

Every year when winter comes and my garden recedes back into the earth, I wonder if spring will ever come again. And every year when spring comes again, I marvel at the incredible cyclical powers of transformation, death and rebirth. Not a year passes when I don't stand at the threshold of each season in awe of the changes that are happening all around me. I have, what I call seasonal amnesia. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually a kind of wonderful blessing, for I get to experience every season, as though it were the first time.

Each season is it's own beauty. How can we judge one as being better than another? As the wheel turns I often find myself ready for the same deep down changes that the earth is manifesting. My whole body says, yes!, I want to imitate the bare trees standing in the quiet of a snowy landscape, or yes!, I want to burst up through the darkness into the light and share my blooms with the world.

Today, I am thinking how wonderful if would be if I could marvel at my own being in the same way. If I could see the wintry depths of my own soul as I do the earths. I have to admit that I have a tendency to want to live in perpetual spring. And yet, I also see clearly the detriments of such a desire, that winter's decay is what brings new life.

In the ancient world the people would celebrate the goddess with kernels of corn, because they were representative of the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. The harvest of one cycle is the seed of the next. Isn't that beautiful?

Such age old wisdom. Nothing new. Those wise-ones have been celebrating death and rebirth since the very beginning. Still though, I have to put my cap of "heard it all before" down, because I cannot help but acknowledge how much wisdom is here. Today I look out my kitchen window upon the veg plot and see the tiny shoots of garlic poking up out of the earth to welcome the new day. It seems like yesterday that I tucked them into that black earth for a long winter sleep.

Spring always returns, and it too shall pass, but there is great comfort here I think. Great comfort in knowing that everything changes, that life is a constant infinite cycle of endings and beginnings.

Today, I feel like the garlic in my garden, encouraged by the light, roots in the earth, life force rising, growing up and down at the same time, trusting, alive, a radiant possibility, a "human-becoming."