Growth and release
The day I took this picture, the garden volunteer had gathered people around and was releasing butterflies one by one. They had hatched from their chrysalises in their glass enclosures, and been transferred to a netted box. With the volunteer’s reach, grab and release, they were let go into their new lives as winged beauties in the butterfly garden at South Florida’s Fairchild Gardens. They flitted around. Landed on us. And then flapped silently into the flowers high and low.
My new friend took me there with her boys, 10 and 12, who scouted rocks for turtles, talked over each other to read the species on the flower placards, loped ahead of us reaching branches, bending at lizards. They were in constant motion.
Motion. It’s been full on since August, when we got notice that a move to Miami was imminent. From that point, airplanes, paper lists, home goods in boxes, and a real estate immersion life course hurtled us into the hottest humidity on my life’s record. We said yes. (More like we said, “Yes, okay, let’s do it, people do this, right?”) And since we arrived, we’ve been floating in the amniotic weightlessness that comes of gestating somewhere brand new.
Floating, forgetting…and then finding
Sometimes I’ve wondered in which direction my soul has been growing. Here is change to catch up to. Change that distracts from a habit of contemplation, to focus on everything-right-now, everything new. Here is grief of loss slaloming between excitement at new opportunities, the wonder of the tropics weaved between lost time with family and friends: a college-aged daughter closer to us than ever before on the West, again farther away, two dear friends with new babies.
And here is Soul Growth Radio, a sliver of its former, once-growing self. Once again gestating—maybe?—all this time, a new aspect.
That’s what I wonder about myself, when change slices right through what I know and makes me think I have forgotten how to…anything. It’s actually less of a wondering and more of a prayer as I grip the oh-shit bar till I’ve rounded the curve.
There is it again. Motion. It’s pushing me back to these pages, to converse, re-collect…open new wings when they’re ready, and flap into the flowers high and low.
