Reflections on this time of transition

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The grey, perished landscape is shorn of colour. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are waking up. Colours are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of colour emerges.

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

Change arrives in nature when time has ripened. There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinuities. This accounts for the sureness with which one season succeeds another. It is as though they were moving forward in a rhythm set from within a continuum.

+ John O’Donohue, excerpt from the introduction to Thresholds, from ‘Benedictus: A Book of Blessings’, Bantam Press, 2007

Do you sense the shift too?

It’s not just in the air, though our weather is clearly in two minds, but in the conversations.

I hear different questions that hint at deeper stirrings in awareness. Of emergent desires that cut across the way things have been.

The pull of ‘returning to normal’ is losing its grip, and change feels inevitable.

Yet, on this threshold, we have a choice.

Do we hold on to what defined who we were, wrapped in our old certainties?

Or are we prepared to shed skin to emerge in new possibilities? However old we are…

Like the perpetual rhythm of the seasons, will we yield to the pulse of new life?

Welcome to this time of new beginnings.

Pause. See differently. Re-story ??

~ For the full weekend reflection, including digest of this week's posts and items of interest relating to The Art of Quiet Disruption, sign up for my daily pauses.