These ranunculus flowers still intrigue me. Even as they drop their petals and wilt with age I find them beautiful. Perhaps their fading beauty reminds me of my own aging process. I no longer look as I once did nor is my body young and smooth as it once was. I too am fading and wilting. My hope is that as I find these fading flowers beautiful I can find fading beauty in the changes in my own life.
Impermanence
I haven’t dropped any petals yet but within a couple of months I will shed an arthritic hip joint and embrace an artificial hip joint. Instead of mourning the loss, I like to think I am becoming a bionic woman. Yesterday I met with a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and at the end of my appointment, scheduled surgery for his first available date (mid-June).
View from 14th Floor of Mayo Clinic Gonda Building
I had hoped that I could schedule the surgery sometime in May but I am learning to be content waiting until June. It is a relief to finally have the thing scheduled. And to tell the truth though a part of me is longing to get it done as soon as possible, there is another part that would put it off forever if I could.
At times I feel clear and confident about my decision. Then a wave of powerlessness and fear washes over me. What ifs and worst case scenarios multiply in my mind. I awaken in the middle of the night with the little hamster in my brain running in circles on it’s own private hamster wheel of self-doubt and second guessing. The only way to stop the hamster from running is to find a diverting book and read until the endless thoughts have relaxed into sleepiness.
Nothing Lasts
As I grasp for a tiny lifeline of control I am reminded that nothing lasts and control is an illusion. Just as winter seems that it will never release it’s tight grasp on us, the season begins to turn, sometimes slowly, other times rapidly. Today I can see a hint of green in the grass and a bit of open water at the edge of the pond. I can wish or hope for spring to hurry and arrive but it will take its own sweet time.
The nature of things on this earth is ephemeral. It seems that only yesterday the land was covered with a thick layer of snow. Now the season of sticks and mud is upon us. Soon it will turn to the time of new life, buds, blossoms and electric green.
Though I cannot control the turn of the seasons in nature or in my life I can act and respond. It’s all a dance of call and response.
This liminal space between before hip surgery and after hip surgery will also pass by quickly (at least in retrospect). The part of me that wants to feel in control is learning to relax into not knowing. I am allowing things to fall apart and change as everything does. And I am trusting that the falling apart will facilitate falling together into something new (and hopefully better).
Inspiration
I’m reading a memoir by a newly discovered writer (to me) that I am loving. It’s called And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading In the Fast Lane For My Own Dirt Road, by Margaret Roach.
Roach, a successful Editorial Director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for 15 years, decided to trade in her financially rewarding but unfulfilling job for a life in the country in upstate New York. I’m finding her book funny, quirky, achingly honest, and uplifting.
In many ways her journey parallels my own from software engineer for a medical device maker to happily unemployed photographer. She is also a lover of nature and seer of beauty and her writing contains echos of thoughts and feelings I felt as I transitioned from the corporate world to a life based upon my own passions and interests.
If we honor our gifts awareness will arrive, and we can live with more congruency, closer to our true self. —Margaret Roach, And I Shall Have Some Peace There
Roach has also recently published A Way to Garden due to be released in late April.
May you walk in beauty. May you embrace impermanence.
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