A Spring Awakening!

I think it is safe to say that we are in the midst of a cold and bleak winter. Locally, temperatures have not risen above freezing in probably two weeks and many of those days we've fluctuated between zero and 15. That does not even factor in windchill, or "real feel" as some call it.


And so I sit at the table in my dining room, gazing out the four-panel bay-window onto my seemingly barren peach trees...trees that I know will show signs of life soon enough. But today, they look dead. They are grey and brittle. As the wind blows across their limbs, they give their own shiver in protest of the arctic assault thrust upon them. Yet in their roots--in their soul--they, too, know they are just in a period of regeneration; a time of self-care, if you will.


I reflect back on my own life at the times I thought I was stagnant and dead...and now I realize I was simply in a period of rest and hibernation. I may have appeared "dead" to myself and to the world but come the spring of my life...man oh man was it a glorious rebirth!

The most obvious time of metaphoric death for me was after my dad and grandma died. One suddenly and one to cancer. I was catatonic for a year. But then I woke up once the ground became warm that spring. I became a parent, enrolled in massage school and exited a career I'd enjoyed for almost two decades. What a rebirth!


Only in hindsight and perspective am I able to see I needed that long winter of rest and dormancy in order to store up the energy for the next stage of growth.


I share this because some of you may be in that same "winter" of life. You may feel dead and stagnant but you're not. May I invite you to shift your perspective that you're in a period of dormancy (not stagnation or death), storing up energy for your spring awakening. Are you ready? I am!



...or, at least that's my 26.2 cents worth, anyway.

~Donald Taylor, Jr.~