4 Things We Learned this Fall (2024)
Advent begins tomorrow, but before we turn our attention to anticipation, annunciation and adoration, let’s look back at what we learned.
It helps me to collect a few lessons from the past season and share them with you in the hopes you’ll find something that resonates with your life before moving forward into the next.
Here are a few lessons from the autumn months when I planted, visited, remembered, traveled, listened and learned.
Plant now for future flowering.
The ground is damp and cold but not yet frozen. That is the time to plant bulbs. They need the cold, dark winter to nestle, root, and push through the soil when the weather warms.
Mike and I are dreaming of a wildflower meadow out our back porch. So a few weeks ago between heavy metal skies and actual rain, we planted 100 camas bulbs.
I am telling you this now, so you can either rejoice or weep with us this spring, when we hope the field will bloom with Camas lilies, yellow rattle, and pink yarrow. Or maybe not the first year.
That’s the thing about hope and meadows. They take time and resilience and enough vulnerability to break your little heart.
2. Visit old friends with a new heart.
After 45 years, I finally took Mike to meet my Tehran American School friends. These are the ones who know about barf skiing (Farsi word for snow), Instamatic cameras where after waiting for professional developing, the whole roll could be black, more waiting for snail mail and music from Casey Casum (before email and streaming), and what its like to have high school interrupted by a revolution.
I’ll be honest with you, some nagging voice inside my head kept insisting I lose the 30 pounds that seems to come and go on my body. But I had old conversations to finish and fresh ones to begin, memory lanes to travel, and forgiveness to ask for. There was a custom 70’s playlist, Larry’s famous sangria to sip, and team corn hole to play. I felt that time had flown and was standing still all at once. I was delighted, wistful and a little sad. We made big plans to see each other again, but as life is beautiful and terrible, two of us are already gone from this world.
3. Quit trying to arrive and finish yourself.
When I keep arriving with more and more of myself on the heels of the beauty, goodness and true love of God’s kingdom, I am truer than I have ever been. As songwriter Jon Guerra sings, “one day I will be who I have never been” and theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, “a lively self is an unfinished self by a God who is not finished with us yet”.
Either way, God is still making us and loving us every minute. If only we could let him.
4. Poetry is medicinal.
I recently realized poetry is part of my essentials list, especially when I travel. I need the way it surprises and challenges me in just a line or two. And honestly, I need the jolt to my imagination and steady heartbeat.
Did you know there is a walk-in Poetry Pharmacy? It is part bookstore, coffee shop, and just what the doctor ordered. I was lucky enough to visit their Oxford Street location in London and pick up two prescriptions for friends, one for Empty Nest and one to Be Original. There’s also bottles for Resilience, Older & Wiser, and Writer’s Block. I walked out of the shop with bottles all wrapped in a prescription bag folded over and stapled with the receipt.
Each glass pill bottle is full of capsules with poems rolled inside and my friends tell me you can open the capsules up, read the poem and put it back inside. Joy!
If I ever collect my own poetry prescription, it might be called Big Sky and include something from Li-Young Lee.
One Heart
by Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of the day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.