I really started noticing the depth of the seasons last year.  How the buds look in spring and the beginning of life and watching the transition all the way to winter.  Now I watch the beginning of Spring again. Life emerging as it does every year, and the comfort that there is life here. I love looking at my plants and seeing them growing, knowing that they will sustain me.  I love the wildness of nature and the idea that all we need is provided to us.  We are meant to heal, we have the medicines we need provided to us naturally.  How did things get so distorted?  The greed?  The idea of worth?  Fear?  Proving?  Power? Ego?  Maybe it’s all of it.  I see the points in history where we learned about power and how we used that against each other instead of learning to harness it together.  How quickly we forget that nature has power over us all. But seeing the beginnings of spring this year has made me feel a certain coming alive, a coming into my own.  A certain rebirth if you will.

I allowed people to hinder me for too long whether it was because I thought I couldn’t challenge authority, or because I couldn’t articulate an idea, or because I put myself last to help their ideas come forth.  We only get so many years and we have no idea how many, so many springs to begin again.  It’s hard to accept the concept that we are dealing with finite in an infinite world.  Understanding this part of my mortality has made it easier and easier to chip away at the idea that I need to put myself last.  I see value in helping others, but I do not see value in helping others who would cut my legs off in the process.  There are choices we make every day and we need to make the choices that are really for the greatest good.  What good does it do to give the pieces of ourselves to others who never bother to fill their own?  That being said, I can’t expect people to give me pieces of themselves either.   It is my job to fulfill my purpose.

All the ego, greed, fear, corruption, power won’t give us more time.  None of those things can improve the quality of lives for others and it isn’t sustainable for very long.  It’s exhausting protecting power.  It’s easier to cultivate and maintain our own strength. When we tend to our own garden we become more concerned about our own bloom than what other people are doing.  We all have seasons—growth, prosperity, slowing down, death.  We go through them every year.  We have to stop allowing others to tell us how to live in our seasons.  We must appreciate each season, we must appreciate ourselves in each season.  There was something in me that feared the bloom for a long time, that feared letting myself be seen in that light.  Like there was an expectation of maintaining a certain glow once the bloom hit.  We need to learn that we are ok to simply shine.  We are meant to bloom and do nothing more than that.  Don’t let anyone tell us it’s not the right season to shine.  We all bloom in our own time.  Let it be seen in its full array regardless of how uncomfortable it makes others.  Stand tall in that light.