I am the spoiler who loves a rainy day. And yet, I find myself wearied by this February grey. A Miss Havisham grey, wasting and unforgiving, a punitive grey intent upon freezing time so as to preserve pain.
While I sit, hypnotized by outside gloom (introspecting, yet outside of Presence), a teacher appears. Eleven buds materialize on a single orchid stem in my office.
I had (mis)taken the orchid to be barren and harbored good intention to empty the pot outside and purchase a new, flowering orchid. But alas, I kept putting off for tomorrow. A testament to God’s Grace that even my worst habit of procrastination yields an occasional blessing.
As of today, three buds have bloomed into snow white flowers, dotted with fairy dust gold centers. I marvel. I stroke a swollen leaf with my fingertips; it responds, “Wait and hope.”
Dear Reader, I leave you with your very own hope-restoring blooms, in the form of a poem by my teacher and friend, Rumi:
Evolutionary Intelligence
This groggy time we live, this is what it is like:
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived, and he dreams
he is living in another town.
He believes the reality of the dream town.
The world is that kind of sleep.
The dust of many crumbled cities
settles over us like a forgetful doze,
but we are older than those cities.
We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state. Then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we almost
remember being green again.
Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligences,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.
It will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
Artwork:
“Iris” by Helena Perez García is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.