To Life!

So the Missouri Winter is finally over (I think...). The supple butter-yellow daffodils surround light posts, mailboxes, and roadsides. The redbud trees' branches are pregnant with purple bumps ready to burst into the Spring air. The leaves of the coneflowers have fanned out like wide open arms excited to welcome the faces of bright color they contain. This year, though, the clematis vine I planted last year seems the most miraculous. Its once vibrant stem and soft purple petals turned brown and brittle over the Winter. To the untrained eye it looked completely dead. It even felt dead. Then, about a week ago, I saw new green leaves pushing their way through the dead brown nubs on the vine. When I stepped outside to mulch my front flower beds this weekend I noticed the whole clematis vine surging with life. The leaves had pushed all the way through, the vine had greened up and grown supple, and all of the signs of death had completely disappeared. It felt like a miracle. All I had to do was wait and trust in the cycle of life and the awe-inspiring power that sustains it.

Our lives are like the Clematis vine. Sometimes the damaging, painfully bitter winds and storms batter us and wear us out. We retreat into ourselves, and grow more rigid, brittle, less supple, and closed off. For a season it can be important to protect ourselves like this--to stop striving and allow ourselves some time for dormant introspection and self-protection. But when the bitter cold and relentless storms have passed we need to open up again, growing softer and more supple. After our time to retreat we need to push back out into the symphony of life's ryhthms, the perfume of its varied scents, the textures of its complexion--even the thorny, surprising ones we can't always prepare for. Sometimes we may not realize how much is new in us to be discovered. But the lilies don't hold themselves back, the branches don't conceal their buds, and the clematis vine is audacious enough to rise up out of what looks like death, by all outer appearances. We were made to be renewed, to burst with unique beauty, texture, shape, and color. We were made to share ourselves, to inhabit our own space, and to brighten and change the world with our presence. To life!