Living close to the land teaches me so much, perhaps most importantly, how I think about change. Nothing stays the same for long, here at Lilac Woods!  The seasons constantly shift, and even though sometimes it feels as if winter lasts for years, it really is only three months long.  And then suddenly it is gone, and my favorite season of spring is upon us.   Burgeoning life reasserts itself in budding trees, flowers, and babies of all sorts.

And yet it’s those weeks in-between the “real” seasons that are the most difficult, aren’t they?  That unexpected fourth month of winter that will insist on showing up just when you put away the hats and scarves. The late frosts that leave me scrambling to move my house plants back into warm spaces.   The summer that returns with a vengeance and 90 degree days after the furnace was turned on for the fall.

Transitional seasons are incredibly tough in our own lives, too.  We have one leg here, the other hanging over there…. somewhere?!  You can’t go back to where you were, but the way forward is foggy, the path appearing treacherous and indistinct.  What am I supposed to be doing?  Where am I to go? All that is left is to wait, more or less patiently, to hope that at some point things will become clearer.  It’s rough.

Doesn’t help that we get reminded repeatedly in our culture that WE are the ones who are supposed to be in control of our lives – and then at some point we realize that actually, um, we definitely are not. Coming job shifts, aging, losses, illnesses … what do we do when we feel lost in the fog? And at times, for years on end.   And then we start to wonder, how are we supposed to trust a supposedly benevolent God who just leaves us adrift?

 I went through one of these long-lasting phases just recently, so I feel far too acquainted with them!  Sometimes I am definitely thickheaded, but as these periods repeat in my life, I think I’m figuring something out. Perhaps these nebulous, irritating, liminal times are at least in part God’s attempts to help us become more ourselves.  Change, especially unwanted change, seems to be intended to remind us of who we are meant to be, to shape us further as ourselves – as this particular, beautiful, unique, much-loved child of the Creator.

Think about the trees. I love our trees here.  They simply ARE, right?  They lose their leaves in the fall and (I like to believe) can only trust that somehow, some day, the sap will rise again and new buds will burst forth.  When this finally happens, they worship their creator by spreading their branches and performing their assigned tasks of generating oxygen, providing shade, cooling the earth, and giving homes for wildlife.  At least for a while. Nothing spectacular, just tree stuff.  They are what they were created to be, and become yet more beautiful as they change and grow and mature, accepting the weather, the storms and the broken branches that come along.  Just being trees.  Trusting, and being loved in return.

Can’t we try to be more like the trees?   Could we maybe honor our creator simply by better being ourselves, and opening to the changes that life brings? Can we consider that perhaps THIS is exactly what we are most asked to do?  And can we know, in both our mind and our heart that as always, God has got this?!