A Time for Everything…
Outside, the trees and grass are dormant, and the photinias that line my back fence are drought-dead, but inside spring is coming.
Kalanchoe is bursting with red flowers, and for the first time ever I have coaxed an orchid into not just blooming, but re-blooming.
King Solomon told us there was a time for everything under heaven
To every thing there isa season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
So it is.
In a class I am taking, we were talking about the cycles of life. Lately I have been feeling very dry, dessicated and uncreative. After receiving a ukulele for Christmas I played it until I had blisters on my fingertips, but I haven’t touched it again for weeks. I started a novel that I was very excited about but again – not for weeks.
Thinking about cycles helped me to realize that we can not always be at the top of the cycle. There must the the silence, the digging up, the war, the mourning.
Our first assignment was to create a mandala, which is a life-wheel. Here is mine.
“Reading” it left to right here are my thoughts: My youth and young girlhood was about passion, flame and impulse. My young womanhood was a time of fertility, stability and rootedness, being strong and rooted for others; my middle ages were marked by tragedy and struggle – but the sun was collecting and finally broke through to shine.
The last quadrant, the time I feel that I am in now, was the hardest to draw because who among us knows where and who we really are? But after sitting with it awhile it burst out of me onto the paper that it is a journey through waters both quiet and turbulent, through lands both fertile and dry. It is a winding road and no matter where it takes us, we all end up right back where we started – inside the place that is God.
