The Incredible Sweetness of Being, Part Six
Spring is muscling right in despite my schedule and I can stop to breathe it or not but it’s coming anyway.
The plum tree is half-leaved already–no, even more. Only a few flowers remain. Wasn’t it yesterday that I awoke and noted the blooms first clinging to branches? The camera battery is dead, a sign my priorities are out of order. By the time I capture a few plum blossoms, I’ve nearly missed them.
I’ve been too busy, lately.
I wake up, rev up, dump the clutch and bam! Off. I. Go. And somehow for all my wheel-spinning my projects linger, leering. My love projects. My writing projects. My work projects.
Nothing is finished.
I need to stop all this spinning and revving and driving under the influence of overstuffed agendas and just be. So I stop and I look at the plum flower diehards still clinging, defying new leaves. “Not yet,” they insist.
And I see that their white remembers pink, even if the recollection is vague, like your memory of that girl who sat nearby in first grade.
I look again, more closely. And I see a tiny spider web, right at the tip of one plum branch. I see stamens, too small to count, crowded shoulder to shoulder inside each flower. To count them I’d have to examine them shamelessly, or perhaps dismember one renegade bloom.
Stamina. The Latin plural of stamen is stamina. I’m depleted but the flowers are packed with stamina.
What’s in this emptiness?
I imagine a legion of spiders, spinning, toiling silently just outside our door. And me, I’ve been spinning too, and revving, and nothing feels finished as spring unfurls, whether I’m ready or not. It’s time to be, to rest in this season and absorb stamina.
I remember, again, as I slip into neutral and breathe, that It Is Finished.
And I refuse to fret anymore, today, about my own unticked agenda items.
It is vain for you to rise up early,
To retire late,
To eat the bread of painful labors;
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.
Psalm 127:2 (NASB)
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