Wheel of Life

With the sun shining and the air calm I ventured outside thinking I’d trim the flowers and shrubs in the planters. It wasn’t long after swinging out of my chair onto the ground that I realized how very wet and cold the earth remains. I sat there for a few moments feeling the cold dampness chill my bottom. Discouraged, I began to reason why this wasn’t a good idea. “The ground is still quite frozen and the cold will seep into your hip joints, your one and only fragile little knee, and your lower back making the next few days very achy, stiff, and miserable.”

Climbing back into my chair I gazed at the sad mix of plants. They looked so dead. There were no bees buzzing or butterflies fluttering around, no color. Only a few months ago this area was speckled with reds, yellows, pinks, purples, whites, and a lot of green. Now, it’s all lifeless and dark, a decay color of brown. “You’ll all come back again, full of color and promise, it takes winter to bring about spring,” I whispered. But was I whispering to the plants or to myself?

I gathered a lap full of dried leaves, “You won’t come back,” I said as I tossed them into the mulch pile. Something within me needed to know what became of these ‘dead’ leaves. I grabbed a shovel and started stabbing at the hard frosty heap. What has become of the leaves, plant trimmings, coffee grinds, egg shells, remnants of fruits and veggies piled in here months ago? Stabbing, breaking up, tossing, going deeper, until finally I saw it, new earth, fresh humus. Smiling, I began to tidy up the frenzied mess I made and thought of my legs; the parts amputated. I hoped and imaged they were tossed into a mulch pile similar to this one, to become anew, to become fresh humus.

Satisfied, I turned my face into the mid morning sun, closed my eyes and waited for its warm kiss. Basking in its glory, not only did it fill me with its warmth but also a new perspective of life mimicking nature. Our lives go through a similar wheel of the year. A reminder, not only given annually through the seasons, but monthly with the lunar cycles, weekly as we embrace each day awaiting the weekend, and even daily with the rising and setting of the sun. The promise of continuum; birth, life, ageing, death and yet we don’t really die, but end one cycle only to begin another.

 One of the things I have wondered about on this, my 49^th year journey, was when I began to wane. When was my noonday, my mid-week, my full moon, my summer solstice? I would have liked to have celebrated it; you know, with cake and balloons or simply raise my glass to the day and offer a profound toast. Would I have lived my life any different if I knew my waning moment? Could this be the reason we don’t know? Hey, if I live to 100 then my joyful jubilee really will be the turning point.

I had to calculate my husband’s waning date. Through my own simple minded mathematical calculations and taking into consideration the extra 12 days for the 12 leap years there would have been; I figure his waning date would have been the day before his 23^rd birthday. Wow! It’s almost inconceivable his passing at 45 but beginning to wane at 23 and the waning moment the day before his birthday. Wow!

When was your waning moment? If you knew, would you live each day differently? Maybe it’s enough to know that one of the blessed days we have during this lifetime will be or was our waning moment, our summer solstice, our full moon, our mid-week, our noonday. We don’t know where we are in our wheel of life, but we can celebrate the day, today, and fully begin to simply love life!