Jumping to the Sun

Bronze Corn Goddess photo by Susa

Everything grows here, the palms, the bougainvillea, every single plant burgeons. The growth is wild, lush, uncontrolled. And I? asks the gardener of my soul. Is the self I cultivate also jumping to the sun? Today I am in frailty, and would wish for some modicum of control. The dizziness I experience is already whirling me. The world I live in tumbles over into great changes. How, in this place where everything grows, a garden of magical multiplication and overnight transformations, how can I keep my girlchild safe and steadied? I practice one-pointed focus, but focus is so deliberate, and growth so feral and uncalculated!

I have placed myself here in this wild garden of Mexican life on the shore of a sacred lake. I have focused my days here. Now I must surrender to the growing, now I shall abandon control, my holding to growth that is scheduled. There is no telling how my growth will go. I give up my mental charts, those maps and strategies that produce only expected results, and never a single surprise. I cannot make a plan for myself or announce one to the world, for the wildness here has its own wild mind.

Paradise photo by Susa

Everything grows here. There is something frightening about that, as well as wonderful. What will I become? Will I know myself? Will I grow in such a direction that my old life must disappear to make room? I don’t want to grow away from those I left behind. Will I grow here until my love can no longer recognize me, grow so that I forget how we did, for a time, entwine our lives? Everything grows here. But plants must die to make room, and so, perhaps, must the passion I had for making a path that two could take. But what does it mean, at 70 human years, to grow? Is it like the sunflower growing back toward earth, gracefully bending her head to kiss the earth from which she emerged?

I brought myself here to turn from focus on the past and to be present to the new. Growth is disorienting. I have had spells of dizziness related to nothing but this necessary disorientation. Growth doesn’t come with a compass to tell the living thing in which direction to lean. Let me be a vine, stretching and reaching in whatever direction is dictated by the light within, the light of the year of being 70. Everything grows here. Though this morning it causes tears to spill down my cheeks, I turn myself over to the teacher named Growth.

It is only recently that I have come here to grow. I am a transplant, in that fragile period called transition. A period of needing tender care and patience. May the climate of growth that drew me here be gentle with me during this delicate time. I am a transplant, vulnerable, willing, and growing. Crying for what I left behind, and for the unknown trajectory ahead of me. Where is my old pot? Why are the sun and moon behaving differently at this latitude? What is this soil, so crammed with nutrient life? And the true question beneath, Can I accept the richness of that for which I have asked?

Pond of Life photo by Susa

Everything grows here. Not just my garden, not only my soul. Everything. Things I want and things I don’t know if I want. Habits shoot up fast here. Friendships blossom overnight. Creative work pours through, and I hardly know to whom it belongs. Sometimes the swirl of growth under this new angle of sun seems to create for me, not only a different life but a different planet.

I steady myself by looking upwards, by remembering that all of us are in the breathing dome together. The atmosphere around the beautiful blue ball, on the edge of the dear galaxy we call ours— this dome holds us all. Not a different planet, only a place where growth is easier than the northern place from which I began, only a time of life when growth is easier than the youth from which I emerged. I choose to embrace this new time of growing. What I shall grow into, what I shall become, I give up knowing. I know only that today I cry out to the verdancy, my Yes.

Call of Light photo by Susa

Exploding Light photo by Susa

Sunflower Light photo by Susa