Giving Voice to My Astonishment

Welcome: Enter the Land of Hope

September is the time of year that I start a mental assessment of the previous months. It happens automatically like the falling of the leaves. As I walk through the woods, the changing of seasons is apparent. The world starts to look more yellow, orange, and brown and much less green and shades of green. Interior changes that I’ve encountered over the past months start to rise to the surface, as well.

Questions bubble up, too. Although still anxious for answers, I notice that autumn allows me to be slightly less impatient. Maybe it’s the cooler air in the mornings, or the fact that I can see nature’s inherent wisdom and I feel reassured knowing that this same wisdom is within me. Like nature, I know when to grow, rest, renew, and let go.

September is a month of beginnings that are disguised as endings. And I’ve been through enough endings now, to know that within each one is a precious new beginning.

While meditating on change, beginnings, and endings, a poem came to mind that I read several years ago:

I know it’s hard to be reconciled
not everything is exactly 
the way it ought to be

but please turn around 
and step into the future 
leave memories behind 
enter the land of hope

~Zbigniew Herbert

I’m not exactly where I want to be, but I am progressing towards that way. I’m not living in the past and wishing for things to be different. I am accepting where I am and perhaps more importantly, who I am, more and more every day. I like the woman that I am becoming and I no longer feel pity for the naive girl that I once was. I know without a doubt, she was doing her best. And after all, she has led me to where I am now: content, happy, and hopeful. My younger selves brought me here, to this land of hope. I wouldn’t change a thing about this path that I’ve walked so far.

Photo taken at Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex, UK, 2013.