Calling it a Life

Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind...each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights onthe earth... So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength. - Emily Carr

I had this sense of strength yesterday.  A glorious sense of letting go.  It's a powerful choice when you begin to define your own self by the gifts you have, the feelings that course through your own self, and the ways in which you find your world beautiful.  April is notoriously my least favorite month.  I've often wished it were wiped from the calendar.  It is the gray time, the melting, the brown time...sadness for me.  It has been acutely so for the past five years now, but not anymore.

I'm not quite sure when, but someday not long ago I decided to stop letting the sadness April holds for me define who I am.  I moved on.  Not in a brash and selfish way, but in a way that just felt right and a way that I just knew was right.  I'm certain I'll never forget the events that led to April being an even darker month for me that it always has been.  I'm also certain that I've stopped allowing those events to infiltrate quite so severely, instead I've begun to allow my eyes to open more meaningfully and to breathe with my whole self again.  I read a line yesterday.  Stumbled across it really (which I believe is never really a stumble, and more of a meaningful path).  Mary Oliver, a favorite poet of mine, wrote in her poem, Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Branches, Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?  And I paused on the page, fingers on the line of the poem, thinking...yeah...sometimes I am.

Five years ago I would have fought with all my being.  I would have been angry and filled with sorrow.  I would have pushed and gnashed my teeth at reading a line like that.  Not anymore though.  Somehow, my roots have crept forward, gaining strength and I've just moved on.  Five years is a long, long time to document sadness and tragedy.  I know sometimes it has to be done.  I've lived there too.  It's just that now, today...I'm choosing to breathe more deeply.