Dear Friends ~ All around us seasonal changes are beginning to mark the passage of time and I wonder—have the efficiencies of technology and the urgencies of modern culture's pace changed our relationship with time itself? I recently participated in a workshop on nature drawing. With naught but a couple of charcoal pencils and a sketchbook, I sat down in the dewy morning grass to look at a mushroom. Twenty minutes passed as we encountered each other. The feathery white fringe encircling its narrow dome caught minuscule pearls of dew. Peering under its cap, I discovered a delicate collar necklace draped at an angle around the top of its pristine silk-smooth stalk. Without disturbing this elegantly turbaned upright specimen, I peered inside another fallen-over comrade to discover a whole ream of filmy, tissue-thin "pages" hidden within its cap. Only later did I begin to wonder if these caps were already fully formed to remain tall narrow parabolas or whether they were just waiting to open like a parasol being raised. Had I opted for the instant gratification of a photograph, the phone would hold an image but would I have spent time noticing how the gills inside morphed from charcoal grey to salmon to ecru? Would I have left any space for wondering how this moment fit into before and after? Or would this little wonder have flitted in and out of memory in a careless heartbeat?
Wouldn't you know it? Last autumn I became a seed and fell into the ground again. That is why I haven't written for a while. How could it always is in the soil. And dark. You can't imagine! But it doesn't matter whether there is light or not because you have no eyes. You feel all alone, and you don't know there are other seeds around you who are also trying to see. Then a little shoot begins to grow out of the top of your head and it starts to feel its way upward through what seems like all the dirt in the world. The ascent is long and hard; you believe it will never end. Then one day in May you break out and into the sun and air. Your eyes are restored, and, when you look around, there are poppies everywhere, all celebrating their own resurrection. What a feeling! I was just beginning to enjoy my own red blossom when a cold September wind stole into the valley and I returned to the ground. Now spring seems an impossible flower. I would surely lose heart if Jesus hadn't told us we are all seeds and that someday we will rise permanently and fall will be no more.