Surveying the landscape for loss and new life

Purpose, transitions, and welcoming the wisdom of February

There are new buds at the base of my elderberry shrubs.

The clover we planted last fall, which failed to sprout and take root at the time, is starting to pop up from the clay.

And the glossy abelias we set into the landscape last summer are sparkling with new green.

Not everything we planted last year made it through the mid-December frost.

The grasses we planted have all died.

Our glorious Mexican bush sage didn't make it.

Neither did our fig trees, but that was mostly due to our carelessness with our dogs, who were late to learn that the sticks found planted in the ground are to be avoided. Protected even.

As the wheel of the year continues turning towards a new season, I find myself reflecting on all that’s been lost, shed, and composted from the season before. I also find myself holding surprise and delight in consideration of all that’s survived.

Life purpose has been on my mind lately. Especially the ways our sense of purpose changes over a lifetime. The good intentions set and plans we make may or may not survive the hard frosts a given year may bring.

You intend to grow your family but the positive test never comes.

You intend to begin charging for a service you offer but no one buys it.

You intend to walk away from a job or situation, but the resources you need to make the shift don’t arrive.

We make plans. We set intentions. We sow seeds. Then it’s seemingly up to the Mystery of soil-sun-water-sky as to whether or not those seeds grow into all we hope they will be.

One seed I’ve been surprised and delighted to watch grow is a business my husband and I have talked about starting for nearly seven years. It’s an extension of the food cultivation we’re doing here at our homestead. It’s called Cedar Wilde. Our primary mission is and will be to grow food and plant gardens, especially supporting beginning gardeners who don’t know how to start building resilience through the self-nourishment of growing food at home.

Like watching the new sprouts grow up from the base of the elderberry shrubs, seeing this seed—one we sowed nearly seven years ago—start to sprout up from the earth has been nothing short of a miracle. If on January 1st, you’d asked me about my plans for the year, this business was not even on my radar. And yet, as the days have grown a little longer and as the bird songs have become slightly louder, we look at our lives and behold, new life is here!

But what of those dreams that didn’t survive the hard frosts of winter?

Or what about those plants whose time has come to be laid upon the compost pile?

Recently, after facilitating a learning session for my job, I closed the Zoom call and was immediately filled with dread. It was a familiar feeling. It communicated to me that something about the way I was working had run its course. There was heaviness in my gut, a sadness in my spirit, and my heartbeat was racing. All telltale signs that something was shifting, dying even. Winter had worked on me in such a way that not everything planted in prior seasons would be able to survive. My body knew it before my mind. Intellectually, I’m still wrestling with it honestly.

But nature is teaching me that cycles of death, birth, and renewal are simply the story of what it means to be a living thing.

In the wheel of the year, February is a month of transition. I recently learned about the Celtic celebration of Imbolc which is held on February 1st, denoting a shift from winter to spring. I don’t celebrate Imbolc, but it’s been fun to learn about this tradition of welcoming the coming light and warmth of this season.

Something about being in the midst of transition draws questions of identity and self-worth up from the deep.

As we survey the landscape of our lives, noting that which has died and that which is bringing new life, it’s reasonable to wonder, gosh, what is the purpose of all this?

Purpose being why we’re here.
Identity being how we’re expressed here.
Self-worth being the indwelling sense that we deserve to be here.

There are some schools of thought that say our life purpose is static. That no matter how it is expressed, the same reason for being is threaded throughout our entire lifetime.

I’m not sure about this, because it seems to me that every new season brings a passing of what was and a welcoming of what might be.

As we sit on the precipice of seasonal change, how might we honor the tenderness of embracing loss alongside the vulnerability of new life emerging all around us?

I have a running list of garden and homestead tasks for this month.

We’ll likely pull out the frost-stricken grasses and the old Mexican bush sage from the beds around our house, and lay them on the compost pile.

We will prune any branches on the elderberries and glossy abelias that need cutting back so that the plants’ energy goes towards producing new leaves and fruits when it’s time.

We’ll sow more clover seed, filling gaps and covering the hardened, red clay so that it’s better able to recover its own ecological system underneath the surface.

We'll tend to what’s growing, grieve what’s going, and do our best to be faithful to our land as it is.

We’ll release the temptation to control and force and manipulate the earth, in an effort to conform it to old purposes and passing forms.

We’ll let it be. We’ll trust the process.

We’ll work with what is, not with our ideas of what should be.

And in this seasonal surrender, we hope to encounter both sustenance and rest.

Let it be so.