When new life emerges, when the little shoot pushes through the soil and the first leaves appear, this tender life needs great care if it is going to grow into the fullness of itself. It needs sunlight and water and healthy soil where its new roots can reach down into the darkness. It needs attention and spaciousness and protection from harsh weather, unhealthy inputs, and anxious over-involvement. It asks for our trust in its life cycle and our patience with its becoming.
As we begin to inquire into our lives, sit with ourselves in this moment, listen to our hearts and all that has remained hidden up until this point, we will begin to notice new stirrings deep in our soil, we will feel the remembering of tender life as it explores opening and emerging through us. This new life might come forward in great surges of energy lifting us up and out into our environments. I remember the summer I discovered swimming, discovered I could float, and found myself full of new life that propelled me across lakes and into joy and washed away great fear. And then days of sadness coming to the surface, needing me to curl up and hold myself and walk deep, deep into the woods. Other times the emerging life has come with such imperceptible movement I’ve needed to stop altogether to feel the unfurling of its fronds.
We don’t know how life will find its way forward or begin to grow and so we listen and let go of our ideas and be always ready to notice this new life as it emerges. And when it does come we must care for it, because only what is treated tenderly and patiently will become the fullness of itself, only what it protected from what it is not ready to protect itself from will have a chance to meet its full potential. And so the mothering of ourselves begins.
A common sign for me that something new is stirring within is that I become resistant and afraid. My discovery of the joy of swimming came after finding myself out in the middle of a lake, past where I felt safe, overcome with fear that I would drown. It is easy in this moment to build the walls higher, to get distracted more fully, to compact the soil more resolutely in what seems like a movement toward survival and keeping ourselves safe. I encourage us all to pause and explore in these moments, to see if in fact this is a time to lock our doors and close our hearts or is it a time to open, to make room, to create the conditions of loving kindness that will allow life to move and grow and come forward? Our protective instincts are important and might be an indication not that the new life needs to be squashed, but that it needs to be guarded and held and nurtured until it finds its deep roots in the soil.
We will be exploring all of this in the coming weeks as I write about mothering the new life with tenderness, patience, and fierce resolve.
Photo by dsb nola.
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