7 Lessons from Spring
I have made it my habit for close to seven years to pause and take note of what I’m learning at the turn of each season before jumping into the next one. This is that practice shared with you in the tender hope that one or more of my lessons connects with your life or holds a gift for you.
Lent is a fitting season for spring cleaning in all the ways.
Mike and I spent the spring, well, actually spring cleaning.
It’s so obvious. Maybe that’s why we missed it. But to actually examine and edit your physical space in the very season we are examining and editing our souls was a revelation.
We were getting ready to put our house in the market which prompted a serious decluttering which dovetailed beautifully with the stripping process of walking with Jesus to the cross. I am not saying they are equal in significance. Far from it. What I am saying is that the bodily movement of taking items out of our house and giving them away or marking them for a yard sale helped integrate the soul shaping of Lenten practices of emptying out like lamenting and fasting.
I cleared off this counter which had become a catchall for every unfinished project (above and below) and actually returned it to being a folding counter. At the same time, we were reading “Death on a Friday Afternoon” by Richard John Neuhaus with our church family.
2. Holy insouciance is the kind a nonchalance I’m after.
I tend toward being serious. So when I learned about “holy insouciance” from Richard John Neuhaus, I was intrigued, not by the word holy but by insouciance.
Here’s how he described it,
We thirst for attainment, which is not yet with our grasp. We each ask Christ, “What would you have me do?” And then, to please God, we do what we can best discern we have been given to do. We do it in freedom with a kind of reckless abandon that is holy insouciance, knowing that the final judgment about whether we have done the right thing is not ours to make.
This was a question that rang in a movie I watched during Lent.
3. Tintinnabulation rings on your tongue, in your ears, and in your heart.
Tintinntabulation from the Latin word for ringing, tinnire, means a ringing or tinkling of bells. Think church bells, doorbells, sleigh bells, bicycle bells, cow bells, even charm bracelets or wind chimes.
Say it out loud (much like insouciance) and you’ll hear it is an onomatopoeia which I am learning as I type this to you, is really hard to spell.
I stumbled across the word while watching Terrence Malick’s movie “A Hidden Life” during our Lenten movie series at my church. It was the second time I saw the movie. It won’t be the last. And like my spring cleaning, it goes well with Lent.
“A Hidden Life” is the story of Austrian farmers and devout Catholics, Fannie and Franz Jägerstätter, and Franz’s decision to refuse to go to war for Nazi Germany. Among the themes in the movie were light, freedom, war, sacrifice, love, belief and bells.
I’ve since learned that the word may have been coined by Edgar Allen Poe in his 1849 poem, The Bells.
And I’ve started to take note of anything with a ring to it like truth, authenticity, beauty, goodness, generosity, or forgiveness.
If you want to know more about why this movie for Lent, a quote from George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” from which the movie gets it’s title is perfect,
that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in the unvisited tombs
And it resonates with the season of sacrifice and honing of our passions. And many more reasons that this article begins to tell.
And the soundtrack, full of tintinnabulation, perfect for writing, gardening, or reading a good book. Or simply enjoying beautiful music.
4. Goodbyes - it helps to pray them, not only say them.
I’ve spent too long thinking that saying goodbye or simply moving on when it was required was enough.
I am beginning to see that when we can intentionally embody our goodbyes, actually lean into the pain they cause, it helps us integrate our experiences more honestly and become more wholehearted. We are more ready to say hello again. This is something our Jesus knew well and modeled for us.
Praying our goodbyes includes four steps: recognize, reflect, ritualize, and reorient. I wrote a whole post about this. You can read it here.
5. Let song lyrics say what maybe you know but can’t quite say yet.
I’ve done it before when I needed to capture the beauty of an ordinary day with a line from “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,
“You light the fire and I place the flowers in the vase you bought todaaaay.”
Now, going to my baby’s baby anatomy scan, mesmerized by 1 hour and 100 photos inside her womb. All I could think of were the imagination of our Maker, Psalm 139, and these words written by Bob Dylan and sung by Adele.
6. Its surprisingly helpful to ask, “Where is my creative energy going these days?”.
One day on a walk, my friend, Jenn, asked me, “Where is your creative energy going these days?”.
We live many states apart so I was hearing this question on Voxer. I suddenly felt a wave of relief because I had felt tapped out of some creative pursuits, but had not yet noticed that it might be because my creative energy was going into a large and long project.
We were finally realizing a 10-year dream of moving to some quiet acreage further out of town. It was a calling really whose time had finally come.
But that meant, lots and lots of decisions from the tiny to the enormous. Both on the new property and at our current home of 18 years. That included selling our current house, which meant getting it ready, which meant the spring cleaning I mentioned earlier, which meant many emotional decisions about kids art on the walls, beloved but worn out furniture, and many goodbyes to neighbors, walking trails, and the season of raising and launching our children.
Jenn’s question has proven a good one for noticing my fatigue, excitement, learning demands and capacity.
7. Playas teach us resilience in times of flooding or drought.
I came home from a trip to West Texas to visit Mike’s mom and wrote about discovering a playa and how it resonated with my journey toward resilience.
A playa is an ephemeral wetlands that hides an entire water capturing and filtering process designed by God to keep our aquifers filled for times of drought. As I walked in the dry bowl, a colander really, I got a glimpse of how our good God wants to shapes us for resilience and quenching our thirst over the long haul.
Now that we’ve had a look back over our shoulders of where I’ve been last season (Spring), now we can do a cannonball into Summer. Thanks you coming along to see what I learned. I hope it sparks a reflection on what you learned.
If you like this post and want to see what I learned last winter, grab a cool glass of something to sip and visit here.