Another season has come and gone. We are saying goodbye to summer and summer flowers. Days are flying by and I’m feeling like I’m speed-reading through my book of life, living in flux and opening in time-lapse and changing in quick succession. Life is going faster. Is that the plan?
My Sweet Al and I have the same conversation every year about our outside flowers. Which ones do we bring in for the winter, water all year and hope they make it another year or let them go back to seed?
We have lived through many seasons. Al reminded me of the years when we were first married and how he stopped by the park and picked a rose and brought it home. Or he’d pick wild daisies, put them in a blue mason jar and place them in the center of the table.
Those sweet gestures were part of past seasons and what they stood far at the time. We didn’t have much and didn’t know much, but we felt rich. We were rich. Today we are richer in understanding of life. He still beams when he brings in a couple of flowers from outside.
These days of living in flux is like a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.”
It only takes one season for the rose to have its moment and bloom. For the yew-tree, it takes years for its moment of potential and completion.
In every seed, there is a plan. The life of the seed is activated, it brings the promise and we live in its potential. I wonder if I have lived according to the plan? It has taken many seasons for my life to unfold and to have some resemblances of who I am and what I could be.
My Sweet Al reminds me that if I see a rabbit, I have to chase it down a rabbit hole. Is that part of the plan or just another detour? I don’t know, but that’s how it is. Why did I have to chase the rabbit, and what did I find down in the rabbit’s burrow?
I looked up the definition for “rabbit hole” since all I know is Alice’s adventures. The dictionary states it is used to refer to a bizarre, confusing or nonsensical situations or environment. Typically, it’s one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
Oh my goodness. Tell me about it; I’ve been there and have had those moments. Al is right, I have fallen in a few holes along the way, and I didn’t always come out smelling like a rose.
Another line in “Little Gidding,” Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
What in the world does he mean as he wrapped up his poetic longings about the meaning of the rose?
I am beginning to know who I am, why I had to chase the rabbit and how I ended up in confusion and nonsensical situations. Also, I learned it takes a lot of faith in God’s words to crawl out of those deep places. At the end of all my exploring, I have come to know myself for the first time and the place I need to be.
Final brushstroke: To back up my thoughts, all the glory of man is like the flower and the flower falls away, but his Word endures forever. And the glory belongs to the Lord. I am beginning to see the fruition of the plan. I’m not chasing too many rabbits anymore. What I found about those rabbit holes is I don’t want to go down them and it’s a lot easier to do it God’s way and follow the plan.
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