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The storm

Slick rock and wet leaves surrounding roots like toes curled in boots of tension and indecisive actions. Days of spring rain falling, half of you still a clear thought, amidst an exhausting amount of hopeful wishes.

How does this happen? How can it rain for days, soak everything around you but somehow half of you stays dry?

It’s because of your canopy. The depth of layered foliage that you’ve managed to grow and nurture. The learned responses to stress or unfamiliar moments that help you to become strong and thick.

It’s because of your tribe. Those that surround you and stay tight to your outermost branches, weaving their leaves with yours. It doesn’t matter that you are maple and they an oak, or you an ash and they a pine.

May you be surrounded. May you be thick with the gift of foliage. May you weather this storm and the next.

Sweet

Large bloom of white, protecting and surrounding, standing out in the forest, deep dark and rich. Fragrant small buds like children holding the future of the species, fertile. Sweet, oh so sweet nectar abounds as the forest begins to awaken to long warm summer evenings of growth, swollen with life.

Sometimes we just need to know that we are protected. We need to know that our needs will be met. Once we realize that they always are, that this journey we call life is as it should be, then we can taste the sweet nectar. Then we can swell with life. Then we can live.

Begin

Warm light on soft white petals holding thought and action. Pollen as seeds, as desires, as possibilities tucked in, held and protected. An expression, still, until the warm light comes. Love, the light of knowledge that turns to the wind of wisdom.

She awaits the opportunity, her opportunity, to open and share her seeds, her pollen, for others to use as food for their family or just to look upon them and enjoy.

Just below the surface

He stands out among the others, older yes, and yet somehow full of life without his shell. His exterior has no bark. Lines, so many lines, some deep and wide and others narrow yet most curve and connect, a whole colony of experience.

We don’t have to wait until we are old and worn to change. We don’t have to wait until all of the things in our life eat at us and make tunnels and holes and cracks. We don’t have to wait until what bugs us begins to connect and make a pattern. We don’t have to wait until it causes our bark to peel away and expose our inner hardened eaten self that allowed it to happen.

We can free what is just below the surface and be our true self.

Spring love

They found each other in a patch of warm soft soil, meeting for the first time yet their roots entwined. Their look and feel are the same, a beautiful shade purple and green and maroon. Were they always like this? Have they known each other before, perhaps in another spring lifetime?

Neither one cares because this moment is all that matters.

Focus

Moist pine needles dissected, roots bulging with rocks of different sizes and shapes. Moss blanketing edges, some with fresh snow, others finding light to melt the snow and be refreshed. Trees as canopies holding back the mist as it burns off from the morning sun, just after a spring snowfall.

When we choose to make a change we need to focus on the tasks ahead, especially the ones that require faith. Those tasks that lead us step by step into our next adventure. The ones that are not clear. The ones that we may not understand how they connect together yet we know, deep down, that they are the right choices. The right thing to do.

Our path. Our choices. Our steps on the moist ground. Maybe choosing the easy footing but then a challenge, a rock and another combination that we don’t think a lot about because we are focused on the sight of the sun, the awareness, burning off the mist of blindness.

We need to have the kind of faith and resolve that a skydiver has knowing that all the preparation up to this point was for this moment, and in order to jump, they need to have faith that their parachute will work and they will land successfully.

Green rock friends

She had a serious overbite that was not able to be balanced out with a sweet side bang. Everyone knew that she was that obnoxious kid in school who always had to be the first one to raise her hand in class. The teacher knew she could always find the right answer from Maggie.

Mindy could never make up her mind when you took her out to dinner. She knew that the menu hid her anxious eyes from you, but honestly you didn’t care at that point. You just wanted to eat.

Ocansha the great turtle king was fully aware of my presence in the forest and therefore chose to just sit in silence even though I begged and begged for some words of wisdom.

Wild Lilly

Through the old leaves and sticks and pine bark. Through the forest floor and foundation that was once someone’s home. Here in the back woods the wild lillies dominate the landscape, enduring, populating. The lillies once just a small part of someone’s garden, maybe the feature or just a cheap way to cover the ugly spots and uneven landscape, but not wild. Now they multiply out in roots and send up shoots of hope and promise and renewal against a backdrop solid and unmoved through decades of witnessing life.

As we age we our thoughts and desires become more rigid. We solidify our persona almost as an act of declaration, determined to be right and make less mistakes.

We loose the joy and freedom of navigating the unknown and learning something unexpected, soft and dynamic.

Challenge yourself to send out roots and shoots. To go past your solid foundation, out into the unknown of the forest floor. Past the leaves from last year and the debris from the last storm.

Past what is known and into an expanse to the unknown.

More blue than white

Stillness bringing a reflection and a realistic view of life. Blue sky and mesh white clouds backdrop to gray clouds of discontent. More blue than white. More white than gray.

In the field of green grass and last fall’s leaves, submerged from the spring rain of renewal, a reflection is brought to light. You realize that spring has come and the warmth of summer will soon follow and with it more blue sky.

Sheer will

After a heavy wind, the kind that takes you out in fragments, scattering chips, and limbs and needles. Making you wonder what just happened. It starts with just one bite but then grows to a colony of doubt and insecurity, fear and uncertainty. You become hollow, just a shell of mild expression, seeming strong and unfailing.

Sheer will gets you through the tough times even when you don’t realize how fragmented you really are. When a strong wind will bend and break what seems to be solid, and someone has to come along and pick you up from the side of the trail.

That is when you try again.