Mother's Day I spent the early afternoon helping my mom to plant her garden, to anchor the seedlings she had bought into the ground: rhubarb, broccoli, various lettuces, chard, peppers, summer squash. The beans we planted as seeds, pushing the oblong pearls into the soil, covering them thoroughly with black dirt. Now there is no evidence of their presence, just flat soil. I know from doing enough of my own planting that this isn't how it will remain, but the row of nothing-but-dirt lies in stark contrast to the inches of green that poke from the ground around it.
The last day of April I flew to Kansas City to begin to close my unexpectedly-short chapter there. I bought 100 yards of rope, rolls of packing tape, plastic tubs, snacks for the long drive back to Colorado. When I arrived, the Oak and Walnut and Dogwood trees had begun to poke out a few leaves; by the beginning of May's first week, the intervals of warmth and rain had unleashed a riot of greens from the trees. Spring seemed to happen all at once, surprising me. And so I drove away from Kansas City last Friday as I had arrived, in a U-Haul, with many boxes of books and some furniture packed in the back, trusting that spring of a different sort might surprise me again.
Last night I lay awake into the early hours of the morning and listened to the coyotes howl. Then I fell asleep and dreamt: a miscarriage that would not stop bleeding; trying to find a place to sleep in a crowded house; driving a car down an icy hill, trying to stop, careening out of control. My life in metaphors. I continue to mourn losses, and find a continued need for rest. I have never experienced so much change, so quickly. Two moves across two state lines in less than a year, a life now stowed in storage, sending tax returns to three different states, a bittersweet freedom to come and go as I please.
Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy: "To sleep, perchance to dream--ay, there's the rub." His thoughts were shaded by the tunnel of ultimate despair. Yet I wonder if Shakespeare also is hinting at the risks of dreaming while still awake, of leaning into the hopes of what might be, and the risks inherent. Hope deferred does make the heart sick. And yet I am learning slowly that there is a difference between hoping in and hoping for. I am learning not to try to steer a destiny which is not mine to control, choosing not to live in fear of what else, or what next. I am coming to understand trust as a choice, and am learning again and again that the One who asks for this trust is worthy of it.
And I am reminded of another stark metaphor, one that would have fit into the sequence of my dreams: Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. No, even in the heaviness of the news this week of Myanmar and China and Zimbabwe and the Middle East, I won't minimize my grief, or refuse to plunge headlong into the uncertainties I face. There can be no resurrection--or redemption--if there has been no death. Touching my own sadness helps me to enter more fully into a world that is not as it should be. I refuse to live cowering in the shade of despair, but to live with the metaphors I have now, believing that there will soon come signs of my own spring.
