Just
back from a walk through the woods on a grey, warm August morning. The blackberries are fully in fruit but
everything else looks tired and bedraggled after a week of high heat and
humidity. I am struck by the wild
flowers whose seed heads are held firmly aloft and whose architecture remains
strong and firm although the plant is entirely dried and brown.
This
disintegration makes me feel melancholic, for the fresh vigour of the spring
and summer greenery is gone and the season of decay begins. And today nature seems to reflect the state
of the world as governments weaken with buffoon leaders; the old securities are
no longer present.
As
a parent, I had assumed the best course for my children would be the course
that I had taken……a university degree followed by entry into a stable
profession; the acquisition of a mortgage and so on. But neither of my sons are following this
path; the one due to a life-limiting disease; the other and his girlfriend from
a rejection of the capitalist life-style and a desire to live a simpler
life. I admire them enormously. The world I grew up in has disintegrated and
continues to disintegrate, and to begin with I felt anxious about that.
But
surely this is a completely natural process?
I know that as I continue to walk through the woods, I will become aware
of the plants dying and seeds being shed into the depth of the earth,
unseen. What are the seeds from this
world that are being shed and are even now nestled in the dark waiting to
emerge in the fulness of time? What new
ways of being, of working, of living may come about if we can let go of the old
ways and be ready to embrace the new?
My working life is in disintegration too………in this time of Covid, my work as a singing and choir leader cannot happen. And I don’t know when it might be safe for that work to resume. There are questions about my identity........I have seen myself as a choir leader and a mum, but with no choirs to lead and children making their own ways in the world, who am I now? And a voice inside me asks whether I want to go back to that full-on life anyway? What are the seeds from that life that have been shed and now wait, quietly growing? What shapes will emerge? It's something I cannot know yet and waiting times are always frustrating. I guess that I am to trust in the Creator and his creative process. Everything is in flux and I am part of that flow. This is a time of waiting, of observing the disintegration, and of being hopeful. I look at the seed heads and I am reminded that God says ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing’. Isaiah 43:19
