The following series of posts were written (by hand…in a small notebook) during my week in Wales in the second week of April. For once, I left the “technology” at home to give myself a break, I didn’t even pack paper and pens; so the interesting thing was to find that the impulse to write was even stronger than ever, especially on waking in the mornings. As “luck” would have it, the owner of the cottage gifted us a notebook (decorated with unicorns!) and this quickly became my new best friend…along with art materials borrowed from my daughter and a few more art supplies purchased in Abergavenny. My week of “no activity” quickly became one of my most productive…reams got written (some of which I am about to share, in instalments, here) and quite a few sheep sketches came home with me too!

9th April     Pause – Rewind – Play

The leaves, here in Wales, aren’t quite “out” yet as they already are at home. Their tips are just showing the merest hint of green ready to come out of tight bud; so it looks like I will get to experience the whole process all over again this week while we are here.

It makes me realise how much we get to enjoy that moment of pure, poised potential when we stop rushing forwards all the time; to appreciate that unique moment of held-breath before exhalation, of dynamic stillness “just before” something occurs, when the possibility of it “happening” first makes itself known and yet hasn’t…yet. Like a delicious pause in the progression of our own evolution, we get to hold both the “before” and “after” in the same moment, a perfect dovetail joint of both and to know all of it as a complete picture, just as Source gets to experience it, outside of time and space. We get to sense the absolute perfection in all of it; all the variables, the possibilities, the before and afters, the stages in between. Our lives are a continuous progression of such moments of pure potential…if we but knew how to recognise them (as Nature does her best to show us).

Being fully present with such moments, we get to know how the bare woodiness (that can seem so drab and unyielding in wintertime) served the leaf’s freshest green unfolding; how it was just what it most needed…at the time. Then we get to experience the liberation, the celebration of it emerging like an inexplicable fizz in the pit of our own stomach; and to know what that unfurling and expanding feels like as a vibration in the air all around us so that we can recognise it again and again in our own lives. All of this is what the changing seasons offer us.

To get to rewind the clock…to where I was a week ago, celebrating the trees outside my window at home turning from stark woody brown to vividest green; to get to press PAUSE>>REWIND>>(RE)PLAY on the process to do it all over again, due to a subtle change in my geography, feels potent and timely to me right now, like a point I was making to myself. Its as though I wanted to make sure I had really grasped this most important thing about the seasons of my life and to truly appreciate the purpose they serve in the grand unfolding of everything, not least myself.

Other posts in this series, written in Wales:

• Letting go of the need for things to be perfect
• Taking back the wheel