Growing Into

How do we ‘grow into’ connected-ness of life? It feels much like having grandma’s pearls and playing dress-up. Little by little the strand moved up on our chest until they sat perfectly at our neck. So much of life is “growing into”; a momentum and shift, sometimes so slight it isn’t always recognized. Like the elderly’s return to a child state of being, we remember. I’m reminded when I visit the SC Island. That faint smell whistles by in the wind and another time and place take the stage. Something from far behind and something far beyond visits simultaneously. Strangely, “growing into” feels familiar.

“Growing into” can feel like you met a soul mate before you understood the depth and scope of that word. You knew and felt the specialty but the words weren’t yet in your heart’s vocabulary. How could you have recognized something you’ve never seen or known?

There is so much grace in the way we stay connected to people and to life, until we know enough to cherish and savor every moment. It’s like a mother with camera in hand, ‘snapping away’ at her little loves; capturing nuances of life. One hand holds the camera and the other a baby on the hip all the while legs are running to keep up with littles who have newly sprouted wings. It’s not until her hands are free and her legs mirror the clock that turned millions of times, that she realizes what the ‘snapping away’ really was. It was a growing into…grace. This grace from the past now feeding the present and future is another poignant “growing into”.

If we weren’t bound by clock-ticking perception, we might not be so shocked that we do indeed experience in reverse and then again fast forward. The “aha moments”are never in the straight and narrow line. Don’t you agree that sometimes the past seems present, and what is present seems past? And they are all jumbled up into life’s most beautiful epiphanies and memories. Life’s circle is an uncanny, deja’vu kind of feeling.

As I walk down the dirt road with towering oaks overhead, the moss slips down from the trees like curly silk threads in a tattered shawl. I soak in the feeling of belonging; of familiarity. Maybe I am here. Maybe I am in a dream. Maybe I have been here before or will be here again. I cannot tell the difference.