The fullness of time for individuals brings me face-to-face with my mortality. I cannot hide from it. The reality is harsh, direct, and in my face, stoning me into silence. When it is driven by illness, it feels incredibly blunt. I am not sure there is ever a right time for death, even as it relentlessly reveals itself in the lives of people I love.
In coming face to face with it again, I find hope and guidance in the words shared by the poet Joshua Luke Smith in the “Sunflowers in Babylon”; “Do you want….? Well then, plant a garden. Plant a garden in Babylon. Bury your seeds in the soil that you’ve battled against for so long because this is the only world to which you will ever belong.”
Life can be defined by its seasons. Life reminds me that the individuals who get the most from life also recognise and work with an appreciation for what has come before and in the knowledge of what will come. In the fall of my life, I recognise my opportunity to plant seeds in the generations that will follow me. I can invest in their growth, taking care to nurture their growth, supporting the work Divinity has begun with each.
In each season, there is beauty. If I cannot see it, I hear a call to go on a quest to find and experience what is already there, waiting for me to discover and experience it. The poem’s words hauntingly remind me of what will happen when I respond, “We [will] find evidence of this hope. Even in the soil of decay, something beautiful can grow.”
Today’s calling is to work with what is here for me to use. As I look to the day ahead, the observation across the generations guides me today. There is “A right time for birth and another for death, A right time to plant and another to reap.” (Ecclesiastes 3.2). In letting go of the stones that strangle my view, I see myself standing in a field of possibilities.
