Every Day, There Is Something New...

 

Every day there is something new. This morning, the first cowslips. Yesterday I heard the chatter of swallows for the first time this year (yes, they're back!). And before that, lady's smock, blackthorn blossom, the smell of newly-mown grass, magnolia flowers, a slow worm basking in the sun.

New, and yet familiar. Because I have seen all these things before, they are familiar. But they are new again each year as the seasons turn and the Earth and her beings cycle through life. What a miraculous paradox we live in - and how strange and yet natural that we should take it for granted. It is, after all, the reality we live in.

Thinking on this, I imagine the span of my life like the tightly coiled loops of a telephone cord (yes, the old-fashioned ones when telephones still had cords!). The spiral grows in length, but it coils round and around, coming back to almost the same spot yet NOT the same spot. Somewhere the same, yet a bit further on. Somewhere different, yet a place that can be recognised because the spiral has travelled this route before.

Sometimes the path of our lives is like this. We all have patterns of behaviour that repeat, and sometimes these cause us problems. And it can be so hard to see that it is our repeating patterns causing the difficulties in life. If the same problem in different guises keeps cropping up, it is worth examining it to see how you yourself may be contributing to the dynamic. Recently, I have ended more than one 'friendship' after realising that my role as a 'people pleaser' was enabling certain people to take advantage of me and that I needed to be more firm about my boundaries. My desire to please was leading me to say yes, whether I wanted to or not. It can be hard to make such changes, but it can be done - and we are all works in progress!

And so we continue on, spiralling around and further along. The spiral sometimes makes it hard to see how far we have come, yet look back along its length. Who were you 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago? The same, yet different. Always growing, always changing, always revisiting what needs to be revisited, always finding a new way to travel the path.

Every day, there is something new...


        

Impatient

Spring is unfolding in every hedgerow. Suddenly there are celandines, raising bright shining faces to the sun. The fields are green, bees nuzzle honey from heather, and even the thorn-harsh thicket offers tender new leaves. 

I am watching, waiting for the first swallows, eager as a child is for Christmas. Surely they will come soon, and my heart will leap in welcome. It has been so long, a whole winter long of longing for spring. When they come, they will swoop in joy, and there will be apple blossom and bluebells and beech leaves, warm nights and long days. 

But for now I wait, and count every sign of spring, squirrelling them away like precious morsels to remind and reassure myself that soon the swallows will return, and summer in their wake.