Take Pleasure in the Flowering of Truth

I stumbled upon this phrase while glancing at a photocopied songbook and balancing Maggie on my knee, all slobbery and full of joy. Phrases like this catch my eye in the exact same way that photographs do – I want to collect as many of them as I can in my Easter basket and store them up for the winter like nuts. I tell Olivia that after she has died melodramatically while lying out in the woods above a steep rocky drop-off that overlooks a cemetery (Iron & Wine playing in the background), I will spend my time in the rest home reading all the books that I refused to get rid of, even though I didn’t have the time to read them during our marriage. She suggests that “maybe by that time, these books won’t mean anything to you.” I give her a look of startled disdain and reply, “what do you mean? They’ll be the only things that will matter then.”

This phrase wiggled off the page with pleasure because it neatly sums up so much in the last phase of life: waiting. Sometime last fall, Lyric and Mommy put a caterpillar inside a jar, stuffing it with grass and twigs. The timing was perfect – in only a few days, the wiggle worm had sewn itself up into its winter home; a miniature mummy neatly tacked onto a delicate twig in two places. Mommy stuck the twig into the pot of parsley which nestled on the kitchen sink window ledge until the parsley dried up and died. The empty pot with the pupa-twig was placed at the window in the laundry/bathroom nook where it sat all winter long. Although it became a commonplace object, the sight of it never failed to draw my thoughts into a gentle pause – would it actually survive the winter? I did not really believe that it would.

We are almost eight years into marriage. In the early years I thought we could figure it all out right away. With enough communication, grunt-work, compromise and sacrifice, no problem was insurmountable. As it turns out, although we humans are gifted with free-will and conscious awareness of ourselves – there are limitations placed on our lives, forces at work outside our control, and mysteries that will always remain mysteries. We may even know what needs to be changed, want to change it, and try to change it – but are forced to wait. We go out in the world to seek our fortunes, but sometimes our fortunes seek us just as ardently.

If we try to pry out the sleeping worm before its time – it will not live. Sometimes there is a truth that you see which others do not. There is a sense of urgency on your part to tell them, to make things happen, to bring it to pass. But sometimes waiting is our only weapon – sometimes it is the only thing powerful enough to remove obstacles and reveal the path. If we wait long enough, truth has a way of revealing itself and making itself known. This is one of the reasons it is so necessary to spend time in nature. Nature teaches us about waiting, about seasons and forces outside our control – forces that can at the same time be cruelly objective and ludicrously beautiful. Sometimes our waiting must be for years, but we never know what beautiful wings are being formed. (see result of our caterpillar above) Can we survive the winter?