Learning to Unfurl
The move from winter to spring is disorienting for me. I feel delighted to have the sun for extra hours, but I also miss the early darkness, with its permission to close the blinds to the outside world and hibernate. I am excited to open the bedroom window for the first time all year but also disappointed about needing to put away my cozy socks. There is the magic of the blooming, but the bright dazzle feeling too much, too hopeful, too insistent. I am stubborn and don’t want to be forced to do anything until I’m ready. I have always been embarrassed to admit my struggle with the emergence of spring, but a few years ago, I came across this poem by Ada Limón:
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
From The Carrying by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón.
This poem perfectly captures the perplexing, bittersweet feeling of early spring that I experience each year, especially right now, when the air is thick with grief, despair, anger, and uncertainty. This year, moving into spring could feel like a shock or a relief to you, a disruption or a renewal. Maybe for you, it’s all of the above.
Regardless, spring reminds me that in the midst of the chaos around us, nature keeps following its instincts. It knows who it is at its core and carries on doing what it does every season without fail. It doesn’t question its timing or resist its unfolding. It grows, changes, transforms, withers, and emerges again. It simply trusts itself.
And that’s the invitation before us always: to trust our own unfolding.
We have a choice to go on despite the madness and confusion, a choice to move forward given whatever reality we find ourselves in, “a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.”
As a life coach, I don’t help you curate a perfect, pain-free life. There is no movement in perfection, just stagnation. The goal of my coaching is to guide and support you in moving closer to your Soul, to that deep, unwavering place where you are not afraid of who you are and possess the knowledge that you can handle the demands of the world. The place where your actions are driven by self-trust and deep knowing, not fear or unconscious compulsive reactions. It is a place where you are curiously flowing through life and not forcing it into a shape it was never meant to take.
Life is changing and transforming around us all the time. That is its nature. The question is, do you want to live like nature, following your rhythm and instincts, or will you ignore or even resist them? Like the trees, will you choose to unfurl and take it all?
Soul Geography 