Saplings

I helped my family plant a couple of saplings today in our back yard. They were special saplings ... two different types of apple trees. One was a Honeycrisp and the other was a Red Nova (kind of like a cross between a Cortland and a McIntosh).

They came to us in a box, perfectly packed for shipment, with the root ball protected in a plastic bag with slightly moist compost around it.  And the saplings themselves looked to be little more than sticks. Long, bumpy sticks with a few tiny buds starting to poke through the tender bark. Below these tiny shoots, on each "tree", you could just barely make out the place where the grower had grafted the fruit-bearing portion of the tree onto the original sapling (the one attached to the root ball). That graft, apparently, was our guarantee that the tree would produce the type of apples for which we had ordered the trees... if that makes any sense. 

It will take a couple of years for these little sticks to resemble trees, and to produce blossoms in the spring. They will need to be staked before this fall to grow straight and tall, and they will need to be covered in burlap before the snow falls this year to protect them from the howling winds and deep snow. They have already undergone quite a process to get to the point they were when we received them, and they will need to be carefully tended until they can stand against whatever Mother Nature throws at them. 

Photo by Matthias Cooper from Pexels

I kind of feel like I am at that stage as a budding counselor. I feel bare, but I am showing growth; most of the growth is underneath, and I feel quite vulnerable.

To continue the analogy, even though I have not graduated from my Master's program, I have already done some growing and have experienced some cutting and healing - just like the graft that guarantees success - and I have started to send out a few tentative leaf-tips. I feel as though I've been planted in fresh soil, and part of me feels like I need to have support as I face the next year of my life when I will do the most growing I will have ever done. Hands-on experience is far superior to book learning - and I sure feel like I have done enough reading and studying to last me a while! So now it is time to move onward and put what I have learned into practice (pun intended.) 

My practicum has been approved, and I will be working on my Learning Plan over the next month or so with my future supervisor, in order to start my hands-on work in September. It is so surreal to realize that a year from now, I will have finished my practicum and will be taking my final course in the program. What an amazing ride it's going to be! 

There are still a few things to iron out between now and September, but these will fall into place as time goes on. I am looking forward to continuing my studies, to the helping hands and hearts of those who will be my "stakes" throughout the growing process, and to new growth in the meantime. 

The blossoms will come soon enough. I'm just taking it one day at a time. :)

The Sounds of Silence

I've spent most of the day feeling quite down. 

Aside from the fact that I have been concerned about someone I can't seem to reach for some reason, or maybe because of that (in part), someone reminded me this morning of that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that I felt when my youngest was living in Alberta. It was the feeling that I'd never see her again: a feeling of dread, of fear (even panic), and of anger that there was nothing I could do to change it.  

So I've been flooded with memories of those days back in 2013, and I've been allowing those feelings to come to the surface so that I can feel them and deal with them. It's hard, but it's better than stuffing those feelings down underneath the surface, and having them pop up unexpectedly.  

Permeating all of that is also the unspeakable sadness that goes with the outcome of those days - she never made it home alive. 

Even though the television has been on and there is that noise in the background, there is a very real sense of stillness, a feeling of incredible silence, of unspeakable isolation. The background noise of grief took center stage for today. And I chose to let it come, and I breathed and felt my way through it.

And it is still going on. It will last however long it lasts, until it's done - another wave-crest in the flood of loss as I just try to stay afloat and ride it out. 

Photo "Lighthouse At Sunset" by
Serge Bertasius Photography at
www.freedigitalphotos.net

Of course it will pass. It always does. Yet it is a journey, a passage from one place to another, this silence, this sadness. Nobody likes to talk about it when they're going through it, only when the "victory" has been won and the yucky parts are done. But this is real stuff. Life really is messy, and sometimes the only victory that can happen is the one-breath-at-a-time survival of the wrenching moments that claw into the soul. It's part of the journey to healing. It's part of embracing life. 

I'm grateful for my husband and my daughter, upon whom I lean when I need to. They see me struggling and - unbidden - they come alongside to help me, just like I've seen them struggling and have come alongside to help them when they needed it. 

And in the silence comes a sort of weird kind of calm. It's a reminder that I've traveled this road before and that I had help then too.  And so - I know that I am not alone, even though it might feel like I am. And because I've been through this before and come out the other side relatively unscathed, I'm going to be okay this time.

Maybe not without scars, but I will be okay. Maybe not today, but I will be okay. For today, I will listen to the sounds of silence and not stifle their voices. Nor will I dwell on them or try to stay here. It will be what it is. It will pass when it passes. And ... though it's not easy, I guess I'm okay with that.