Genesis

Just before check-out guests at this hotel find beside their beds a paper bag holding a hagenia bulb in soil.  Part of Bisate Lodge’s reforestation project, this is a gift they won’t take home. Hands cupped liked shovels they dig and blanket this sapling in the Rwandan earth, and through this act unwittingly assume ownership of the tree it will become. For now, the hotel employees instruct, they must return to see how it grows.

It’s more than just the beginning.  According to Oxford Dictionaries it’s “the origin or mode or formation of something”.  And it’s hard work, I don’t care what anyone says. Doors and websites for new companies open for business only after countless sleepless hours of blood, sweat and yes, sometimes tears. Expectant mothers slog into the delivery room at the nine-month mark anxious to free their bodies from the exhaustion of incubation. God put so much energy into creation even He had to rest on the seventh day. 

I become a gardener at my house on Vineyard Lane.  I choose this house specifically, with intention to raise my family and cultivate roots to spread deep and wide. I till not only my children, but our small patch of land. With a sunny, southern exposure in the front yard, I want textured purple, white and pink perennials.  Delicate, willowy gaura and heavenly scented lavender replace thorny brambleberry. Spiky-centered coneflowers make way for iris, allium and monarda.  Most plants yield fairly easily for me. But one tree holds on for dear life.  I try several times over the years to pull her out, but this tree’s roots gird her, unwilling to surrender to the hacking of my pernicious persistence. Eventually I give up.

Comfortable in this home where we all grew up, even though each of us wants to move on, none of us takes steps to actually do it. We are all stuck when I make the bold move to put the house on the market. With the sign in the front yard I feel pregnant, so focused on the frenzy of preparations, I think about little but the logistics leading up to the moment of change:  Closing the doors on the moving van is a lot like pushing the baby out of the womb.  What now?  I fail to scout within myself, underestimating my feelings in the aftermath; not only the brand new circadian rhythm to be created for the business of life, but the wringer of emotions to fitfully twist through.

The deeper our roots, the more difficult the uprooting. 

There are times over the course of the last (almost) four months where I feel like that tree in my front yard, so unwilling to allow myself to pulled out of the ground even though I am the one doing the pulling. But it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  I achieved exactly what I set out to do in that home, richly and religiously fertilizing the soil with the stories of our lives, spreading roots of unimaginable depth and breadth. A life this abundant is jarring to dig up.

With the gift of perspective that a little time brings, I now wonder how we can become more like saplings, make ourselves easier to separate from the ground we’re calling home?  What if we recognized and accepted that new beginnings happen all the time, and allow ourselves to bloom wherever we find ourselves planted?  Changes we ask for, and circumstances we don’t ask for, throw us off the planned course and set us on a new and uncertain path.  We need to permit ourselves a little grace, acknowledging the magnitude of our emotions, granting ourselves the time we need to become comfortable in the new normal. 

New beginnings are hard enough, we make them harder when we fight ourselves. As human beings we are marvels in adaptability, resilience and resourcefulness. When we trust we can find ourselves no matter where we are, we undoubtedly will.

I drive into the old neighborhood periodically and look at my front yard. I do feel a tremendous sense of ownership for all I have cultivated. When spring comes again I will want to take a peek at my beloved and intoxicatingly fragrant Thalia daffodils. I wonder if the new owners will take on the crusade to remove that tree with the unforgiving will.  If they do, they are certainly in for a fight.  She’s a Rose of Sharon.

We are saplings

Forever uprooting

Into new beginnings.