Inky Orchard

I heard the phrase, “Transformation is beautiful” in my head while I was entering into the most majestic fall scene I have yet encountered. Pure yellow everywhere I looked. And I didn’t just look at this yellow, I immersed myself in it. I entered the woods. It’s one thing to see beauty or goodness and appreciate it. But its another thing entirely to go further, desiring more. Expectation of depth.

For me, there is no denying that God brought me to where I live now, that He is all things lovely, and that me being here is also lovely. What I get hung up on is the transition. Old to new. Good to … better?  Georgia to Tennessee. We always forget about the change – the actual stickiness of the process, the footpath between two places. Yet it is amazing how our feet discern a path at all– that I don’t get lost.

I need to learn how to live now. To breathe the air I have to breathe. To be content. To be quiet. To be loud, sometimes. Instead of always looking to the left or right, comparing and evaluating. Or looking back to what was familiar, or eagerly anticipating the next season. I never like where I’m at. What I need to get my mind around is that change is constant, and it brings me good. Consistently. In a way, humans are enamored with non-personal change. The day after Thanksgiving we all zap into Christmas mode. Little girls daydream of the day they transform into captivating ladies. We marvel at the green leaves turning to vibrant yellows, reds, and oranges… eventually fading to brown. We know the cycle but we are continually in awe of the effect. Tiny green buds appear on bare branches. A delightful blue sky quickly turns to thunder and gray. We’ve seen it before, yet we are always impacted. Startled. Impressed. Pleased. Relieved. Should we not embrace personal change with the same eagerness? Instead we always seem to get caught up in the muck of it, a muddled perspective feeding us unhappy thoughts over the instability. We like to be rooted. It’s taxing to be in transit, to not have a resting place. Yet how will we ever see that these times of being “uprooted” allow for the magic to happen? If I’m going to be uprooted, I want to be planted in better soil. I want to see and believe that my heart is a forest of golden yellow when I embrace change. I won’t need to take leaves home with me as mementos because I’ll be chock full of them. Brimming from the inside. Beautiful.