Cycles

As I pulled into my driveway this morning after running errands, I saw two impatiens blossoms, white and open as full as any jazz trumpet, waving in the morning breeze to greet me.  Add these gracious hosts to the still vibrant lilac blooms on the butterfly bush by my back gate and the lurid pink mouths of the sweetheart roses near the door, and no one would believe we were midway through October.

These flowers and their extravagant shocks of color woke me up this morning to an idea that's been tickling at my brainstem for awhile but wouldn't quite come into focus until now.  I've been thinking so much about timing lately, about seasons, about the cycles we follow by rote, the ones we follow blindly, the one we adhere to without even realizing they exist, and the ways those cycle dictate a life to us that may not be the one that is most authentic to us as individuals.

Katherine Anne Porter wrote: “There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”  


If she is right--and my life over the last couple of years certainly dictates that she is--and we are all living lives of almost pure chaos, then our feigning rightness, order, and certainty must be a huge part of what contributes to humankind's general unhappiness.


I have many friends in the throes of crisis today, personal, professional, internal, external, tangible and intangible, and at the heart of all of that suffering--and at the heart of my own--lies an overwhelming need to do what we all feel we "should" as opposed to doing what we want.  I keep wondering what it is that has convinced us all that we don't deserve the joyous lives we envision for ourselves, what keeps us running around the track, chasing a mechanical bunny that never slows down, that always eludes us, that never ever ever satisfies.


And then, I think about my flowers.  The rose and butterfly bushes are perennial, meant to return each year, but they are both far past their blooming season, and by all practical calculation the impatiens, an annual flower I plant each spring because their bobbing blooms always seem like nature nodding yes to me whenever I want to scream no, should really be dead by now.  But they're not.  These flowers aren't adhering to any cycle that seeks to see them wilt, die out, shrivel, or go underground for another year.  These flowers are blooming--blooming!--right here by my door, reminding me that the only limits to my own blossoming are the ones I set for myself.  


Today, I choose color and life and beauty, joy and brightness and blooming.  I hope you, dear reader, do the same.