I’m walking in my neighborhood more and taking in the sights, sounds, and humidity I feel. I enjoy my walks between 6:45 am and 8 am. During that time of the day, the air isn’t too hot yet with the rising warmth of these Orlando summers. I like these walks. They call me to a place of being more present with my body, my thoughts, and my prayers. I listen to podcasts and playlists on Spotify. I walk and chuckle, I walk and reflect.
I’m cultivating a lot of life in my garden, which is part of a community garden. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, there was concern that gardeners would not be allowed back on property due to very stringent rules to keep coronavirus at bay. After some good convos and working things out like observing social distancing rules and bringing disinfectant to clean tools and other items we’ve touched while in the garden, we were given access to the garden.
In a time where much of what we all were used to doing and having as regular rhythms in our lives has been taken away or limited due to the pandemic, gardening for me is a very sweet constant. It’s something that pours life back into me as I pour life into my plants.
I have a front porch garden that I partly use to grow plants bigger and then transplant them into my two plots at the larger community garden. I also grow things that are easier to care for at home than in the garden. I have parsley, basil, mint, two watermelon plants that I’m getting hefty, five sunflower plants, and a Santa Fe grande pepper plant on my front porch.
I’ve beamed seeing little seeds I put into the soil, like sunflowers and watermelons, grow in my front porch garden into little baby plants that now are grown-up plants, healthy, strong, and vibrant. Y’all…I’ve even planted a papaya seed and it germinated and it became a papaya tree seedling! I AM GROWING A TREE Y’ALL!!!
In the community garden, I have three watermelon plants, a lemongrass plant, two tomato plants, a jalapeno plant, a cucumber plant, rosemary, and three sunflower plants growing. A lot of life is happening in these spaces. Seeing these plants grow steadily over the last two months shows me that life is happening even in the midst of a lot of uncertainty and loss due to COVID-19.
My garden is a comfort to my heart and a blessing to my soul.
I feel sometimes you have to be with your process.
For me, that may mean getting a cotton facecloth, sitting down on my bed with my bedroom door closed and letting my emotions connect with my heart and grieve the desires in this heart that continue to live unmet, unfulfilled.
To cry and to lament what I want is not what I have.
And to express my sadness in that.
And the reality that right now, what God has given is what I have.
The tension of where hope and here co-exist together. The reality of the good and the tough tracks of life that we all live on at the same time, no matter the season. The inevitability of what it means to live actively in your waiting. And that this spiritual growth producer that waiting and longsuffering become in you continues with you, in every decade.
What is it about waiting that God deems so necessary for us as His children?
Why does it vex my humanity so?
I want things now but I’m guided to live in light of the yet-to-come.
My heart doesn’t always understand. My mind tries to make things logical, practical, strategic. My tears just know the wait has been long and ‘holding pattern’ feels like the answer that I keep getting.
Lord, I’m listening. Help me to hear the way you are speaking to me.
Modern poet Joekenneth Museau says, “People aren’t taking time to deal with their own issues because there’s always a distraction or something to take you away from what’s going on inside.”
I can feel things that need to be expressed in me before the words come. The tears are my indicators. I give them their propers. And respectfully move my logic and thinking to the backseat of myself and allow my emotions to drive me for as long as the good cry is needed, as long as it takes to truly out get it out.
I cry. I pause. I breathe. I cry again. Repeating this cycle, blowing my nose into that facecloth, embracing what the tears are helping me to do: deal with my life and what I’m feeling and what those feelings want to tell me.
Sadness isn’t bad. It’s a feeling just as joy is. I want to make space for my sadness. And to give my tears room to breathe.
The past three weeks brought me more emotions than I anticipated the month of February would deliver. But often, that’s exactly what life is – Unexpected. Unrelenting. Upsetting. Unsure. But it’s also other things too – Good. Healing. Surprising. Sweet.
I found myself over the last 21 days walking with the Lord through some intensely deep and at times heartbreaking moments involving someone who once was a part of my life. What has comforted me most is knowing God saw those 21 days before I even entered them. He saw them. He saw me. He knows me and He knows how I would walk into this experience, first as the incredibly deep thinker I am and then as the uniquely connected feeler I am.
Both parts are special gifts He’s intentionally placed inside me. During the last three weeks though, sometimes I was like “God, being made like this, to be such a deep thinker and deep feeler is making this experience so incredibly hard to walk through. This would hurt less if I wasn’t wired like this.”
I could imagine from God’s view those very gifts of being uniquely wired as a strategic thinker and highly emotionally intelligent very well helped me navigate the unexpected emotions and realities I had to face in this experience in a healthier way. I took an emotional intelligence test recently and it revealed out of a high-end score of 130 on the EQi scale, I scored a 124. Mercy. I’ve been made to acutely sense, understand, and communicate my emotions and the emotions of others very well, which shapes the way I move in the world. God made me a highly emotionally intelligent being. On purpose.
If I wasn’t wired in these unique ways as a thinker and a feeler, my experience of everything the last three weeks would have been, could have been so much more difficult. But as I reflect on how I navigated through the pain and the surprise, I realize I gave myself what I needed to work through the experience.
I prayed. A LOT. I talked to God about everything. And He listened to my hurt, my anger, my pain, my loss, and my recognition and acceptance that a move toward a finality I had never thought about or wanted would be necessary for me to move forward.
I walked and I listened to myself move my feelings out of my body as my steps pushed movement into my feet. Movement sometimes helps me connect even deeper to what I’m feeling and I meet a lot of truth after some miles have been made.
I journaled and connected my feelings to my thoughts…which yielded 22 pages of reflection, emotion, and truth that helped me to let go and invited peace into my heart.
I processed with my inner circle and they prayed, listened, and comforted me with the kind of love and steadiness that only comes through authentic relationships.
I cried and I let myself feel what those tears had to say. Some of the saying was hurt. Some was disappointment. And some was the sweet release that’s given when forgiveness is offered in the midst of brokenness.
I rested in the strong foundation of wellness that I’ve built with intention into my life over the last year and three months. A foundation that poured into my health, gave me focus for what I hold high with value, and the purposeful actions that allowed me to love myself so well with self-care. That foundation was readily available for me to lie back on when my thoughts and my feelings were too much for me.
I realize that the gift of love gives us so much. It gives us beauty and unspeakable joy. But it also gives us the risk of being hurt. Because where our love goes also goes our hearts and our feelings and our emotions. Those beautifully invisible things wrapped in all three that are full of incredibly vivid color when we are so happy it feels like our hearts are gonna explode. Happiness emerges that etches itself in the sky blue backdrops of the best days ever, days that you want to last forever that feel like sunshine and embraces and good things you only dreamed about that finally happened and you want that feeling to just last forever because it was just that good.
Those moments are SO GOOD.
But the days that unexpectedly come that are their foils feel so terrible, just as the good felt so wonderful. Sometimes love also means experiencing deep hurt. Opening yourself up to the happy and the joy may include more than just those things.
What I’m finding true for me is that I’m willing to risk for good love. I want to risk well. With wisdom, discernment, hope, and courage.
I consider this truth as I risk: “When has loving anyone ever exempted us from pain and challenges?” I’m learning that love doesn’t bring that hurt and pain. But caring for someone, opening yourself up to vulnerability, being willing to connect relationally to someone beyond yourself – that is where the chance to breathe in heartbreak can come.
And the caring is because we feel and we feel because we’re human. I’m learning to continue to live and lean more strongly into the sweetness of my humanity. For in it I’m seeing so much of who I really am. And I’m deeply loving who I’m discovering, tears, happy, beauty, and so much more.
Just when you find that sweet spot in life, that comfortable place, that uncanny familiar, change comes in like a flaming bat out of hell and whirlwinds all your comfortable up. If you’re limited in your thinking you’ll fight it every way you can. But, if you’re ready to grow, you’ll embrace change like a new love and let it lead you to growth you could never dream of but always sensed you desperately needed.
There are songs that just feel like life when you hear them.
Songs that taste like a sunrise unfolding before your bedroom window at the point where night says hello to dawn and heads back to his star-filled hammock.
Songs that smell like honeyed coconut and touch like brand-new duvet covers, soft, comfortable, safe and inviting.
I fell in love with this song more than a decade ago when her debut album hit the music world. We were all forever changed because of Ms. Arie and her melodic truth-telling.
I knew this song was a gem then. I still count it as a priceless treasure now. When I hear it, in those first few notes of the melody and the bass line I hear truth, I hear realness, I hear authenticity.
Then India starts to sing and I step into a moment of truth to agree with her words, embrace them as my own and sit down in the affirmations each verse gives me.
I’ve embraced these words in such a personal way that last weekend, at the closing retreat for an incredible 10 month leadership program I took part in, I decided to sing each and every word.
In front of 40+ people.
Without practicing.
Without music, so very A cappella.
On a whim. I literally decided to sing moments before I did.
Each of us in the program had the chance to share how the last 10 months changed us and what we learned about ourselves. I shared that the program helped me heal from deep losses and gave me incredible community in ways that I couldn’t have thought to ask for.
I also shared that this song, India’s song, came to mind that morning and reminded me that through this year, through the pains I had to process and heal from I could see that parts of me I thought I died were still with me. The strength, courage and wisdom I felt at times were lost to me had never left. They were just healing inside my heart, along with the rest of me that needed time, space and grace to recover from the wounds of grief that hurt but do lead to wholeness again.
I sang the whole freaking song. Verses 1, 2, chorus, the bridge and the vamp.
I was so nervous that I kept my eyes on the lyrics via my phone the entire time. I could hear the nerves in my voice at the beginning.
But they calmed down and I sang and I stood in vulnerability and in doing so, I believe I found a little bit more of myself in the process.
I found more of Melody in those melodies, standing behind that podium on a sunny Saturday morning in a Daytona Beach hotel where I let my story have its freedom in music and its freedom through me.
