The crocuses

They have survived after all.

From winter to spring

I am anxiously awaiting the crocuses.

By all accounts, they should be up by now. However, I've never had much luck with bulbs, despite the incredibly easy instructions on the package and the relatively little care they appear to need. Place deep in the ground, allow to freeze, wait, be amazed. Isn't that the way they're supposed to work?

Source: flowersgallery.net via Katherine on Pinterest. 

These are not my actual crocuses. Because I'm still waiting for them.

I've seen some bulbs attempting to push their way through the industrial soil by the train tracks as I walk to work, and making their way out of the neighbors' mulch, but mine are reluctant. I wonder if they became food to the bunnies and squirrels that tease my cats during the fall.

Fall displays of bulbs get me every time, despite my lack of success in the past. As the weather grows colder and the days get shorter, I need the hope that they give me - the hope that spring will come again, that things will get better, that the sun will return.

Last year's hyacinths took me by surprise.

It's the same hope that I need to keep going when the things we call "negative emotions" start rearing their heads. Last night I was assaulted by a wave of jealousy, loss, and regret.

My throat is tight, my shoulders are up around my ears. With every breath I have to tell myself to relax.

My reactions are mine, and all I can do is stand back, look at my reactions, and determine the best course to follow. Which is why I put quotation marks around negative emotions - because all emotions exist, and we all have them. It's what we do with them that's important. I felt myself composing statements that I would regret uttering, so I left the situation.

We have talked a bit in Yoga Teacher Training about suffering as a choice - that pain will come and go, but we can choose whether we suffer from it. This struck me as a powerful idea - that I can choose not to suffer. But when pain comes, making that choice becomes difficult. How do I detach my emotions from the events, remove my need to interpret, react, make sense, and instead simply observe what I feel and let it pass?

I'm not there yet, and so I need my crocuses to come up. To remind me that there is hope. There is spring, and that new things come to take the place of old things.

These would be the peonies of last year.

In another month the peonies will begin to poke their strange voodoo heads through the ground, and spring will begin in earnest.

New beginnings

What "detached" is changes, depending on the day and the things I'm working on. For several months now, I've been detached from the blog itself as I sorted out issues involving employment, career path, and state of mind.

Or perhaps I shouldn't use the past tense there, since none of these things are "sorted out" in any permanent sense. Sometimes not even in a temporary sense.

One thing I've come to accept is that all things are temporary and provisional. The trouble with that is the tendency to get caught up in the future - what happens when this ends? What will I do then? I think that's what I was talking about when I talked about redoing the kitchen - that even while I had the job, I was afraid to spend money for fear of what might happen in a few months. Perhaps this was a wise decision financially, but perhaps it was unnecessary. Eight months have passed since I lost my job, and I haven't dipped into my savings at all. I've been earning and turning down unemployment. I haven't always loved what I was doing, but from mid-August on I was earning enough or nearly enough.

In the meantime, I've delayed some joy.

Not all of it. There have been many, many moments of joy, particularly since the new year arrived. A new, though temporary, job has helped me to be kinder to myself and to move away from those days of fear and doubt. We've had an exceptionally mild winter. I've changed in so many ways.

So I've decided to retry the blog, explore the things I hold onto and the things I have let fall away.