A flower from one of the bouquets sent for Mom's funeral
When flowers are blooming they seem so soft, so delicate and open. So alive and so full of possibility.
Come winter, when the blooms have gone brittle and brown, the flowers seem hardened by the elements and closed off.
They look dead.
But that's just appearances.
The flowers are dead, true, but they are also going inward for winter, cutting back to their bare essence, stoic and silent and waiting for when their seeds will sprout under the warmth of the spring sun.
I feel like a spent flower this week. With grief making me rough around the edges, pulling me inward and a little unstable, as if I will drop my petals at any moment.
I know that grieving I'm doing isn't just for my mom. (Although it's part of it.) I am also grieving the parts of me that kept me from having a different kind of relationship with my mother. I am grieving parts of my life, too, all that I have not yet achieved, all the times I've been too scared to really live and played it safe instead, all the times where I chose judgment or anger over love.
I am finding that there is a dying that happens for the living, too, in our grief.
And while it is uncomfortable for me at times and sometimes I just want to be "over it," I know that this is part of the process.
And I trust that the process is perfect.
My coming into December feeling spent and brittle is exactly what it is needed to bring forth new seeds of being and new seeds of possibility.
For now, it is enough to be with the dropping of the petals, to trust in the timing of their release and to use this time of inward focus to identify what needs to be planted for the coming spring.
(This post is inspired by a conversation my teacher, Jan Smith, had about this metaphor on the conference call this week for the Future Thinking community.)