Green Life Ignites Life

I spent much of a recent Fall weekend with an angsty feeling inside.  The plan was to freeze and dry herbs something I had been reading about on-line.  This was the plan yet my inner gears resisted as an unidentified sensation churned within me.  

I stood at the kitchen counter eating leaves of parsley and basil, sprigs of rosemary and ripe cherry tomato orbs.  A month ago this would have brought me great pleasure yet this particular day I just wanted to cry.  Suddenly I got it and I wasn’t even trying to figure ‘it’ out. 

A thought went through my mind: ‘This is good-bye.’

 

In that kitchen moment, I suddenly realized I can dry, freeze and package my herbs, can tomatoes and keep the green ones in the dark so they ripen later yet in that moment I knew through all this doing I was only prolonging the inevitable.  

I was in the midst of an ending. I know, I know it also marks a beginning but it is an ending all the same.  I must let go.  And to fully let go I stand in two worlds in the present.  I open, embrace and lean into the unknown of what is unfolding while honoring, loving and appreciating what has been --- summer’s gifts of herbs, spiders, tomatoes, butterflies, bats, bugs and hummingbirds. It’s similar in Life’s Kitchen, this continually being in a place of stepping into the next moment while leaving the prior moment all in the moment. 

I pulled myself away from the kitchen counter and with a hot cup of tea sat outside in the chill surrounded by changing leaves.  As I did this, from my being arose the remembrance of joy, the joy I’ve come to feel when holding and tending the dead animals that find their way to me.  

Suddenly I realized this same joy is meant for saying thank you and good-by to the garden plants and herbs. What a shift I experienced remembering the gift that comes with honoring and feeling the joy of engaging with the green world. If moments prior I had resisted listening within I could have easily gotten stuck in an unnamed experience, disconnected from myself  and become grumpy for the day. What I was initially labeling angst and unease would have kept me from an epiphany.  

Tea finished I went to my little raised beds and began to gratefully clip tomato vines and place them in the composter. This endeavor associated with dying was imbued with living. My energy shifted and my mood lifted as I loved green and growing things. 

Those vines, considered dead to some, now lie alive with Love’s energy preparing for the coming Spring and I am at peace. I am at peace knowing their composted green bodies hold Light that will again ignite Life. 

I am at peace as Winter begins for the process of loving green life ignites Life’s Light in me.  

-Dawn the Good News Muse, 14 Nov. 2012

dawn@imaginetheshift.com