Every spring,
I stagger Rio plants along my front porch steps.
If you're unfamiliar with Rio plants,
They are these amazing tropical-looking flowers with bright blooming petals of red and pink and white.
In June,
They're just beginning their journey,
Small and eager to grow.
And as the summer progresses,
I watch them gingerly reaching with their delicate stems,
Searching for an anchor to wrap around.
They always find the stair railing,
And then they wind their way along the rungs.
And sometimes they find their way around other structures,
And even each other.
By September,
They have morphed into these magnificent,
Mature flowers that radiate color and grace across the entryway to my home.
They bring me so much joy.
Year after year,
It never gets old.
The excitement in the spring when I plant them,
The anticipation of what they will become,
The encouragement of their branching vines in the July heat,
And the awe and gratitude I feel when they've reached their peak.
A precious gift to me and to everyone who passes by.
And then at the end of September,
When the days are growing shorter and the nights are getting colder,
There's always a palpable sense of grief that arises as I unwind the vines that so tenaciously twisted themselves around my railing,
Wrapping themselves tightly as if their very existence depended on clinging to their surroundings.
And yet I know that this feeling of loss is not the flowers.
It's mine.
Nature does not cling and does not despair.
It accepts,
With grace,
Each stage of its existence,
Never rushing and never clinging,
Simply being,
And in simply being,
Always giving exactly what is needed to the earth.
Sometimes I try to apply the acceptance of plants to my own life.
I wonder,
Where am I in my journey?
Where am I rushing or forcing?
Where am I clinging?
How can I accept like nature?
I think right now I'm probably somewhere in August,
Definitely beyond the pure potential of the early buds,
More mature,
Secured around my own kind of railing,
But with some slight withering apparent around the edges,
And not yet ready to let go.
And yet I will let go someday,
And that day will come faster than I can imagine.
And when it comes,
How will I choose to be with it?
How am I shaping my relationship with impermanence now,
So that as I navigate each phase of my journey,
I find grace and gratitude for what is present?
I invite you to consider these ponderings now in your own life,
And to use the breath as a readily accessible example,
A personal resource,
If you will,
To the infinite beginnings and endings we experience.
Each breath having its own start,
Middle,
And expiration,
Each with its own unique expression and nuances,
And each as vital to our survival as the last.
No one breath is more valuable than another,
And the breath,
Like the plants,
Does not cling.
It comes and goes without fanfare,
In and out,
In and out,
In and out.
Watching your own breath now,
Following its path from start to completion,
In through the nose,
Down the throat and into the lungs and belly,
And then back up and out the same way,
In and down,
Up and out,
In and down,
Up and out.
Noticing the subtleties with each inhale and exhale,
The coolness around the nostrils on the in-breath and the warmth on the out-breath,
Coolness and warmth,
Coolness and warmth.
And in your own time,
By your own guidance,
Noticing any other nuances in your breath,
The variances in depth from one breath to another,
The smoothness or difficulty of each breath,
How each breath impacts the rest of your body,
The sensations each breath elicits.
And if you can,
Without forcing,
Finding appreciation and perhaps even awe for the sheer magnitude of impact each breath holds,
The complexity of functions necessary for your life that exist because of this unconscious exchange that happens over and over and over every moment of our lives,
In and down,
Up and out,
Coolness and warmth,
Birth,
Life,
Death,
Life and death,
Joy,
Grief and gratitude,
In and down,
Up and out,
Coolness and warmth.
I would like to leave you with a poem by Jessica Sowers called A Poem for the August Garden.
She's weedy and wayward,
Won't hear a word of direction from nobody.
She's beautiful in the way that wild things are,
The kind of beauty you know you don't stand a chance of taming.
She's a lover with one foot out the door.
She's loved you well and fed you sumptuously,
But no matter how hard you love her back,
You know she won't stay.
This is the garden in August,
The unfettered earth which grows with a vengeance,
Splitting at the seams with dried flowers and enough seed to feed my children's children.
Loving her will explode the mind with wonder and break the heart all at the same time.
And even still,
I swan dive into this Beulah land every chance I get,
Just to see her blossoms and taste her fruit is worth every time I have to watch her go.
Embracing it all,
The meek beginnings,
The paradox of creating,
Of flow and struggle,
The joy and the awe,
The grief of endings,
And the acknowledgment of the love that brings us back time and time again to these processes,
Choosing to return despite the pain to this magnificent experience of being.
To this magnificent experience of being
