What do you notice in the image? You will have noticed different things to what drew my eye. Some of you may have seen the lighter patch in the middle of the background. Some of you may have noticed the patterns in the leaves falling in different directions. Some of you may have noticed that there are different leaves in the image. I quietly sat with this image after it had invited me to be just be with it. |
I sat with the question, why this part of the image? Why does this part matter? In the last few days there have been difficult and hard journeys. A community's journey carrying a long hard story, a wider community making decisions that came from the long hard story. My own long hard stories that sit around the heart and strength of life. Colleagues who journey with long hard stories, some of them coming and holding them more easily than others. Some of them recognising their presence more easily than others.
The depth, character and contrast in the image all sit around the brown leaves hanging down. The leaves that have lived life, and now enter death, enter their ending, the surrendering. No longer exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen, no longer processing the nutrients fed from the earth through the trunk and branches. Lying, hanging, being the hard stories that are present. Growth of the fern tree doesn't happen without surrendering the leaves to loss. It won't see new growth, or the light, or sustenance without surrendering its old leaves, no longer to do their thing. They must hang down. They must let go. For a time the hard stories are present with us. If we ignore them, or drop them too soon, it will not do us good. In their time they will drop away, and shape our world and story differently. The earth will break down and absorb their surrendering, but not before it is ready to.
It takes courage, strength and honesty to hold the hard stories. It takes a reality of life's awareness to know that they are there and are needed to be there. It takes a particular vulnerability to let them be present for as long as they need.
Some of us will hold the hard stories, some of us will struggle to hold the hard stories. . . . .