“Happy Resurrection from Fear to Love, from grief to joy,
Five years ago, I was one year into a five-year journey of healing from divorce. I’ve found it takes me, at least, about that long to fully restore my spirit energy from one of life’s deepest wounds. I’ve also learned from layers of such grief-inducing experiences; intense grief work; plus speaking and writing about the universal experience of grief for a decade-plus, that when in grief our senses are on high alert. It is in our darkest times that we realize the beautiful gifts that do surround us.
I had traveled to South Carolina, to my sister’s home that Easter weekend in 2012. Grace and I were living in a lovely brick Georgian townhome complex and we walked our errands from one end of the Green Hills region of Nashville to the next. I found the hidden paths with the most greenery for our foot travels. Every few days of that “sprinter”—a mild winter that took its time unfolding into summer warmth—unveiled nature’s glory in a new and different incarnation. The Tennessee red buds, with their delicate orchid buds nearly encasing slender slate-covered limbs were magical. One does not realize how the flowers encircle their host until you examine a tree closely.
I took this photo, above, with my first smartphone, an Android, at the North Carolina Welcome Center along I-40. It was the first time I connected that the Red Bud trees started off the warm months as flowers and then turn to these tiny garnet leaves before they became large red leaves that loose their red sheen as they begin to merge with green eventually became heart-shaped entirely green. I still love this photo and remember the joy those leaves sparked in my heart.
And, I remember well, the email with those words at the beginning of this post, that arrived in my inbox that Easter Sunday morning from my spiritual mentor with whom I’d journey the next four years. The apron strings from our intense work were cut this summer. What remains is a beautiful intergenerational friendship. And this morning, five Easters later, he texted me on his first-ever smartphone:
“Have a wonderful day! Create your spiritual resurrection each now.”
While I have reached the five-year divorce-healing threshold last year, my teacher, Ken, has continued to follow me into this new journey of raising a young adult with autism. It is a route so filled with obstacles I’ve not had time to do more than clear new paths, fight dragons, make sure we are well fed, exercised and rested. So my blog has been silent, my Instagram account slow to be filled, though there’s much to have been said and be visually documented. I’ve been too busy patching together a quilt of services for Grace. Yet, I’ve learned from the last five years to resurrect myself in each moment is all that I can do. I am here now. The past is dead, the future not yet born. All I have is this one moment.
