Open


Nature is a bounty for life lessons, providing us with metaphors everywhere, if we are awake enough to see them.  The changing seasons each bring us "classes" of their own, that teach us patience, perseverance, strength, and vulnerability as we are continually given challenges in life that test what we learn.

I've never witnessed the poppy in this seemingly suspended state.  I've watched these beauties bloom every year for as long as I can remember, yet I seem to have only captured them in every other state. First, being completely held tight inside the safety of their pod; second, in full glorious bloom; or after, as they shed the paper-thin petals to the ground around them.

I've been thinking about boundaries and openness lately, and have been looking not only at how both are present in my own life, but also in where they could be improved upon.  In the past few years I have certainly become much more present in my world.  I pay much closer attention to how I react, the things that I make time for, the things I don't make time for, where I expend my energy to.  As a Libra it's always been a constant striving for balance, but after 40 years on this earth I'm finally coming to realize that there is no such thing as balance.  Balance doesn't exist because there will always be something taking the back burner while you focus your attention to something else.  And one thing will always get more time and attention than another.

The amount of time that this poppy spends giving us something beautiful to look at and admire is so short in the span of an entire year.  And at this moment she seems to hold steady, trying to muster all her strength to open up and be completely seen.  It's such a short moment, and you never see her turn back.  She doesn't open halfway up and then decide "Nah, I'm going back in my pod."  Nature always completes its' process.

Perhaps that's where feelings of being "stuck" come from.  Having things undone.
The things that are never said.  The things that are begun but never finished.  The things that finish before they even start.  The things that unravel and are left in the corner of the closet until we have the time (or energy) to pick it up again.  The things that we never open up enough to give our energy to.  Being open is being vulnerable.  And even though everything that blooms dies in the end, it still blooms. Even if it doesn't bloom quite perfectly, it still blooms.

Where can you bloom?


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