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. :)

Quiet

It's quiet. But this time, the silence feels different than at other times.

I remember other times, other moments, even other places. For example, a week ago, as I was sitting in my dormitory room in Calgary, Alberta, with my roommates gone for the day and me finishing up breakfast, the quiet was deafening. I felt isolated, alone, trapped. I was thousands of miles from everyone I held dear, eating breakfast alone without their company, without their laughter and conversation, making do with my keyboard tray and my laptop as a makeshift table, and feeling incredibly homesick. Tears began to sting my eyes as they rose to the surface. 

Of course, it wasn't as bad as one time (one very LONG time) when I felt so very alone. My youngest child had died and the funeral was over, and the sympathies from well-wishers had tapered off, and I was (yes) surrounded by my closest family and closest friends ... but knowing that the tick, tick, tick of the clock would never again be interrupted by her raucous laughter or her crazy antics ... made the quiet an open sore.  I wanted to play the last video she sent to me just to hear her voice again, but it made my family sad, so I sat in the quiet - the cruel, taunting quiet - and suffered loss that no parent should suffer. 

A few days previous to the breakfast incident in Calgary, a classmate took me to "see the Rockies" - we drove up to Canmore, Alberta, (see my previous post) and I was increasingly in awe of the indescribable vastness of these wondrous creations, the closer we got to "The Three Sisters" peaks. Even though most of the time my classmate chattered away, in the core of me there settled a blissful quiet, where I was able to commune with my baby girl because she had seen the Rockies this close too, about a month before she died. It was somehow a shared experience, and in the inner quiet ... I felt close to her in a way I had not felt for a long time. And I knew she knew it, and that she was deliriously blissful and at Home, more than she ever could have felt here. I knew that she was okay, that her restless, anxious days were done. Happy tears slipped their way past my lower eyelids and slipped unhindered down my cheeks.  The quiet healed me, soothed me, comforted me. 

A black squirrel - July 19, 2017,
on the Mt. Royal U "Lincoln Park"
campus,Calgary, AB.
It nearly blended in
to the tree trunk...

A hare munching on fragrant white
clover, July 20, 2017

In Calgary this year, there were also times during the ordinary hustle and bustle of the day, when I sought out the quiet and made it part of my day; there, I could recharge my emotional batteries and gain strength to face whatever task was ahead. There was a lovely park on campus where I would linger either on my way to or from class, and sometimes both... being there seemed to restore my soul. Perhaps it was because it was so beautiful. I watched the water from the man-made waterfall tumble over the rocks and land in a little pool, close to an arbour with a little park bench inside; I smelled the roses and drank in their striking fuchsia, bold musical tones that sang to my eyes and caressed my nostrils in the breeze.

I was particularly drawn to the wildlife in Alberta. I got to see some amazing creatures there; to the locals they were a dime a dozen, but to me, they were remarkable: magpies, gophers, and hares abounded. Even the squirrels were different than at home: larger, and black instead of reddish-brown. They were fast too, so I was pleased to get a photo of one (see above, left). The quiet they produced in me was tender, almost a communal feeling. I felt somehow at one with my surroundings. It made being far away from home not quite so lonely. 

But the quiet today is different still.  It is a calmness, an assurance that all is right, that I am where I am supposed to be, that my family is not far away, and that I can rest and relax without worrying. I can close my eyes and know that when I open them, I will see the familiar - the jumble of cat toys and pillows, my books and papers, and the occasional cat walking across the floor or playing in an empty cardboard box. 

I like this quiet best of all.

Winter Dreams

I've been dreaming lately - daydreaming that is - of warmer temperatures, and of different sights, smells, and sounds than the ones I'm used to.  

Of crocus poking their noses out of the snow.

Even though short-lived and killed with the ice storms of April, their brief interlude breaks the frigid curse of winter's icy breath.

It's hope that a gentler, kinder season will soon be upon us.  

My nightmares of course are of winter.  Unbending, unfeeling, monochromatic with its white, gray and black metallic sounds of howling, whistling, and shushing.  The house shudders under the weight of the harsh winds and heavy snow.  And my mind wanders again.

The purroo, purroo of mourning doves.  As early as April their courtship rituals grace the angle of our roof-top.  Their song wakes us in the early hours while the sun is still rubbing its eyes.  I can hear them in my mind's eye.  I can see them, sidling along the top of the roof, the males trying to get closer and the females shying away, playing hard to get.  Yet the chicks always seem to appear anyway.  And they learn the song their parents sing.

And the last sign of spring - a flash of fire-orange red hopping across the lawn, stopping and standing perfectly still, head cocked.  Then the head bobs and the beak disappears deftly into the soaking earth, lifting its prize to the light of day: an earthworm who dared venture too close to the surface away from the spring run-off.  The triumphant hunter swallows - his cheery chirrup is the ultimate in spring sounds.  Soon his will be joined by other voices - peeping insistently for him to give up his prize to feed their bellies.   

The smell is in my nostrils.  It is a life-from-death smell.  Dead leaves from last fall, rotted under the snow.  Dirt left behind as the snow melts - each snowflake leaving behind a small speck of dirt - adding to the topsoil.  Little piles of animal leavings, covered over in layer after layer of snow - now revealed.  And the barest hint of light green under it all.  The promise of new growth.  

Even though I know it's only a dream - a warmth spreads over my tired spirit.  It won't be very long.  Not long at all.

A safe place to be

Last night I was thinking about this path of healing I've been on the last 18 months. I was trying to think of something - an analogy - that would describe how this all started and how the process happened. Then I remembered something that happened about 20 years ago.

My mother had given me a Hoya Carnosa plant. It was lovely. I admired hers - and she had two of them, so she gave me one. This photograph to the right is a picture of a hoya carnosa in full bloom - each of the flowers emits a gloriously heady fragrance from drops of nectar that hang from the centre of each one.

I put the plant she gave to me in the spare bedroom ... intending to water it. At first I did, but after a time... I forgot. It shriveled and the leaves dropped off. The stems became brittle. It looked dead when I found it again, about 6 months later or so.

I was saddened. And I was unwilling to throw it out. Not yet. So I took it from that place where I had neglected it, and placed it in a central spot in our house, where I would see it every day.

I started to water it - keep the soil moist - for weeks. Nothing happened. It still looked dead. I poured water into the soil anyway.

Unknown to me, the root system was gathering strength, being renewed.

And then I noticed it.

A shoot! A tiny shoot coming from the centre of all that deadness. Encouraged, I kept up my program of pouring into its life. And it responded. Shoot after shoot, over time, started coming from the brittle twigs - and some of them eventually softened. The truly dead twigs fell off. New life had begun - it was like the plant felt safe enough to "branch out."

After about a year or two, there were long, glorious stems and from those, lush green leaves where once there had been deadness. But there were no blooms. I added a little tiny bit of plant food into the watering once a month, to give it a little boost.

Then the riotous blooming started. A nib appeared - it looked quite prickly. Then another, and another. Gorgeous clusters of hoya carnosa flowers grew from those nibs - one flower from each of the prickles. My plant book said to leave the nibs alone even after the flowers died and dropped off, because more flowers would bloom in the same spot again. And they did. Again and again and again - and each time it never ceased to amaze me.

For many years that plant gave back to me its beauty and the simple pleasure of being itself.

And all I really did was give it an atmosphere that was safe, persistently pour into its life and feed it with food that was appropriate for its species and size. It was in that atmosphere that it grew, flourished, and started giving back to me - and to its world. I just took care of it, and gave it the proper amount of light, water, and food to give it a chance ...to be.

That's what God did for me when I first started this journey - and what He continues to do. He brought me out into a safe place where I would not be neglected, where my dried-up spirit could be nourished. He never gave up on me. He poured His love and grace into me when I felt like I was abused, victimized, and abandoned, and He kept me in an atmosphere (with other people who had gone through the same process) where I could feel safe, where I could develop some roots - and eventually branch out.

Through this process, I came into who I really was. I discovered my inner beauty - all because of His loving care, His gracious acceptance of me the way I was, His insistence on giving me a safe place to be, and Him using people to be "Jesus with skin on" in my life. I started to blossom with gratitude in that atmosphere of love, nurturing, and acceptance.

And I am determined to live this day, this 24-hour period, toward Jesus. If you smell a sweet fragrance from my life, it's because of His loving care for me that there is the fragrance of me being me - for Him.

Finally.