Rebirth

Time to bloom?

My earliest memory of my childhood was on my birthday, which falls at the end of May. Growing up in Montana, that meant it was still winter. I remember bundling up and walking out of my family’s small house. I was young and I was overwhelmed. Sometimes my family was just too much for me.

I remember also feeling unloved. I don’t remember why, just that I wasn’t being treated as special as I wanted to feel in that moment. I angrily crunched through the snow, and over a small hill behind my house. There, bursting up through the snow were crocus flowers. Stretching their purple petals up to the sky, pushing the winter from themselves. I sat down at let go of my anger. The tears came. I felt loved. This was my birthday present. This was where I felt seen, cherished, and connected. This natural and wild world was my true community.

Growing up with the land was foundational for me. We didn’t use electricity, so we lived within the rhythms of the light and the dark. We were bored, playful, imaginative, creative, and sometimes wildly dramatic. There was also plenty of pain and we didn’t escape the pressure from society completely, though we got a running start.

Having my foundation so strongly anchored in the earth made the years following my eleventh year of life, when we left that home and the land at the same level, even more challenging. I have moved about every two to three years since then.

Each new uprooting from a home has it’s benefits and drawbacks. For one, hoarding is not an issue. You learn to start to value possessions a little differently when you have to assess and pack them up with regularity. I’ve gotten to travel to many interesting places and meet lots of cool people. I have learned to let go and begin again. I have had to push out of my comfort zone and grow enough to make it my norm.

The drawbacks are experienced more subtly and pervasively. I wait to feel okay in my skin, sometimes for years, until I am again standing on the land. Grounding takes deliberate work and effort daily. And, I think I have developed an allergy to cardboard boxes. It’s not just the cat that gets miserable when they show up at the house.

Thankfully, nature is with me wherever I go. Trees have gotten me through more than I could ever begin to describe. And, oh how grass feels happy! Even under the microscope!

A single blade of grass observed under a microscope. the smiling faces are the channels through which the water is sucked.

So what is this whole rebirth business about? Why not just spring? Birth?