Planting bulbs is an act of faith, believing in the unlikely proposition that sticking brown blobs in the ground during the fall will result in bright flowers come spring. Of course it doesn’t always work. Sometimes animals eat the bulbs, or they just never bloom. But just as often the bulbs multiply unseen under the ground, bringing you a profusion of flowers you never thought you planted.
When has your faith in someone or something brought more than you had imagined?
Like Robert Frosts’s diverging roads, there come points in life when the tracks one has been steadily chugging along suddenly offer complicated options, and you simply have to choose. The trick is to maintain faith that you are on the right track.
Do you see tracks converging in your life and offering you a new direction?
We often find ourselves having to reinvent what’s important to us, and come to terms with dissatisfactions. Yet sometimes, our dissatisfaction is based on definitions we’ve created for concepts such as happiness, fulfillment, usefulness, connection that are definitions that no longer fit our situations.
What definitions do you have that might be based on old information and that might need some tweaking?
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.
―Rainer Maria Rilke
How have you been transformed by a time of discontentment?
Nothing says “lovely, breezy summer day” like laundry fluttering out on the line. Iced over clothespins might seem pathetic, but they are also a reminder that the seasons can be counted on to change, and that we can trust that while our clothespins might seem pointless now, their time will come back around.
What do you treasure for its past and for its possibilities?
