Pondering

I continue pondering the rapid season change.  The trees are leafing out already.  The temperatures have been in the 70s.  People in church this morning seemed to have unearthed their summer clothes.  Easter is three weeks off and I wonder whether all the spring flowers will be gone by then.  Get with the program, I tell myself   So what if you were expecting a more gradual progression?  This year is different.  Still, it is hard for me to go from winter to summer, with spring only a whisper of what it usually is.  I enjoy full spring.  I enjoy watching things come to life more gradually.  If I had not remembered last year*s glorious golden forsythia, I might not have known I had not seen it yet this year.  It is mid-March and it feels like late May.  It feels… odd.  Somehow the light and animals and vegetation are not lined up in familiar order.   I guess I will dig out the summer duds this week.  But I*m not quite ready.

Consider this:

Have you taken your temperature recently?  What do you miss?  This rapid season change helps me remember what I was expecting,  not just expecting seasonal change to progress in a particular way, but  also my expectations of the way things usually are, and therefore the way things should be.  These expectations surely can bog us down, or perhaps help us remember the way things were, and understand better our grief at things being different now, our missing things.  Have you taken your temperature recently?  What do you miss?

No and Yes

I wait to hear about a part-time position for which I interviewed two weeks ago.    I am almost certain the answer will be no.  Truth be told, if the answer is yes, I have some praying to do. 

I used to see no as only a failure to get my way.  Now it takes on different dimensions.  Part of it may be that now I am almost 57, with more than half those years ordained.  Life experiences, the gains and the losses, all the gains and the losses, show me, when I consider them, that I have probably learned more about what comes next from the no than from the yes.  Of course when I am waiting for something, I always want the answer to be yes … so I can decide.  A no means the ball is out of my court.  I can only begin to see the possibilities when I take a step back.  Sometimes it even takes two steps.

Consider this:

A no is always a loss of some sort.  I believe we spend our life regaining our balance in light of things not going our way.  The no response puts us off-balance.  Where have you heard no most recently?  How will you take that no and grieve it?  Who can be there with you as you live through the stages of grief, whether they are the standard Kubler-Ross stages, in a standard order, or whether you skip over anger and live in denial for a time?  Who are your grief-buddies?