Going Outside

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. God’s inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread God’s coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality.”

— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

With spring comes noise. I wake to birds outside my window. Mourning doves, chickadees, cardinals, finches of all sorts singing their praises. Black birds’ squawk interrupt moments of silence. I fall asleep to the chorus of frogs. It takes no time for my neighbor’s tractor mower to rumble up and down his lawn. New shingles getting replaced in the distance. An unfamiliar dog barks intermittently across the pond. Vast difference from the muffled sounds of winter.

Every spring the eruption of earth bring the urgency of new life. As much as I want to rest in the space of this sparkling season there comes a physical need to help in the greening and flowering around me. My act of the raking and pulling out the mushy remnants of autumn make space for what is waiting patiently to pop out of the cool earth.

At the same time it feels as if the attention to the Spirit in myself has been delayed. Spring requires the tending to the neatness of my home that includes the outside. I have often thought those yards that were once tidy and suddenly fraught with weeds and unmanaged branches were reflections of the hearts of those who it belongs. I can’t help but wonder what must the neighbors think with the sparse and mangled spirea still sitting in the center of my empty garden.

My season to becoming and being requires dying, as Thomas Merton said. It is not easy work. And, as much as I would like to take my time in the slumber of winter to ponder the process, it may be the time to go outside and begin pulling away what is covering the bulbs that lay beneath waiting to bloom. My garden reminds me of this need. My clematis that crawls up the trellis every spring looks for me to pull away the dried branches so the rich blue flowers that demand a glance can show themselves. Removing the sloppy decomposing hostas of old quicken the growth of the green and yellow striped leaves.

The work of coming home to myself comes along with day to day life. As much as it gets interrupted by the ordinary, it interrupts the routine. It comes with the brushing away what is not necessary anymore to reveal what has been waiting to emerge. This cycle of children graduating from college, not coming home for the summer break, finding new adventures, and sweet grand babies filling my phone pushes me outside. Outside to garden and to fill in the spaces that have been asking for something altogether new.