In The Dead of Winter

We are in the dead of winter.  Smack dab in the middle of it.  And I struggle.  

My energy seems to gel and sink like the sap in the trees and the perennials around my house.  I look wistfully out my back window to the seemingly dead tall grasses.  The big blue-stem has been flattened with the last ice.  The many kinds of sparrows and house finches relish in the many hiding places the vegetation offers them.

Experience and wisdom reminds me of the life under the hard and frosty soil.  I know it will soon be awakened with the spring and I will have a job of keeping the weeds at bay.  Before I know it, I will be traipsing the early morning hours away in my little yard.  Tucking a vine here or supporting a stem there.  Getting lost in the ordinary.

My beds look messy with left over vegetation.  Dead branches, vines and vegetation haphazardly spending their days.  "Why not cut them back now?" my husband asks.   "The soil needs them," I reply.  Like an old battered quilt in the chill of the morning, the vegetation blankets the soil.  The used up and the dead and the growing in perfect harmony.

Yesterday, I attended a funeral.  The preacher was an old man with the wealth of experience of a well matured garden.  His words were rich and filling.  Sorrow, loss, mourning, joy and memories and faith filled his voice.  The roots of his soul were deep within a faith built by years of producing fruit, decomposing and producing again.  I felt as if I could feel his soul.  The Word of God met years of stories, glory, heartache and struggle and reached ours.

That is real life.  Lived.  Accepted.  All of the things that happen in the dead of winter in our lives creating the texture, connections and foundation for faith and wisdom and legacy.

Lonely widow.  Broken wife.  Lost woman.  Lonely mother.  Searching and seeking.  

Accept the feelings as a part of the great and living legacy you are building.  

Accept the death of your labors and the death of some of your greatest dreams and loves.  

The pruning of the sin and entanglements and the bearing of life mix together and create the soil for the planting and producing of the best years ahead.  It looks ugly now.  Tattered, dead and dark.  

Underneath, in the heart of the life you have lived...is the fountain flowing through those layers to bring forth a harvest in its due time.