By Tabitha Bozeman
Late spring is almost-summer, a nearly-finished season of the first flowers and spring rain. It is a season that feels full of growth, but not settled. Spring is a time for enjoying the beauty and color around us, but also anticipating the hot and humid days ahead. It is a quietly anticipatory time that feels more like a passageway than a completed space. Life often mimics this shift.
I have had many opportunities to enjoy the shifting seasons in my own life lately. My daughters are moving up a grade, leaving elementary school behind forever. I’ve been enjoying newborn snuggles as a new “granna.” This week, we found a car for our newest driver. It has been a season of quiet contrasts where I find myself rocking a baby while discussing car insurance with my 16 year old. Somewhere between diapers and drivers licenses, I realized I’ve travelled through a passageway into a new space and season.
There is a tree in the parking lot of the CVS in Alabama City that always stands out to me because at some point in time it sustained some sort of alteration either from a lightning strike or some other accident, or it had another tree grow up with it so closely entwined they look like the same tree. However it happened, it is always interesting to look at because the leaves on various branches do not always match up. In the fall, part of the tree will be a solid gold while another section is completely red. In the spring, there are at least three varieties of green leaves on the branches. In the summer, one section appears heavier than the others, drooping under the weight of foliage that is just slightly different than the rest of the tree. I love the contrast of it.
In a few days, I will be travelling overseas for the first time. The contrast of this momentous first happening at the same time as other important moments in the lives of my children is not lost on me. When I think about all the firsts and lasts happening simultaneously in my life right now, and how the lives of my loved ones are shifting and changing and intertwined with mine, I think about that tree. Virginia Woolf said “all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.” I love that fall isn’t the only time for changing leaves–Spring brings changes, too, with the warming sun and stormy seasonal shifts. New growth, surprise flowers, a busy, shifting time when one season is wrapping up and another is announcing itself. It feels like a lovely time to recognize these shifts in my own life, too.
Anytime we move through a passage of time and step into a new space, we are forced to re-evaluate where we are, who we are, and what our purpose and goals are as we do the seasonal cleaning needed to let some things go and plan for the next adventure. Changes like this can be unsettling, scary even. We can question the little things and the big things: wall colors and relationships, landscaping and the meaning of life. This is normal. The bright white iris that popped up in the middle of dark purple blooms and the tree with different branches are here to remind us that even nature switches things up sometimes. Changes and shifts might introduce some uncertainty into our lives, but they don’t have to be harbingers of doom. They might just be the little moments we need to really pay attention. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes these import of little moments like this: “What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” Every day, we experience so many of these little moments of beauty and uncertainty and joy and loss and excitement and change–and aren’t all of those little moments what our lives are made of?
Tabitha Bozeman is an instructor at GSCC. Email at tabithabozeman@gmail.com.
