Sometimes words strike us with a special force and penetrate our spirit with their “rightness”. They don’t have to be complicated or powerful. They don’t have to change our lives. They don’t have to move us to take actions in uncharted territories. And they don’t have to heal or cure us. Their role in our lives is to speak to us that we might recognize what they have to teach us.
I don’t remember when I first saw these words. I can’t identify the source. I wasn’t trying to complete a writing assignment or looking for a special message to share or a solution to some problem I was having. But when I saw them, I knew they were words I needed to save.
Fast forward at least ten years and two moves later. I was cleaning out old files that had no room in my already over-crowded file cabinet. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. And suddenly, they were there: those words I had saved: A three-line poem with only seventeen words. I sighed as if I had just met an old friend and smiled with the joy of “finding” what I wasn’t looking for!
Clearly a gift from God, they reached into my heart and gently centered my life. I read them out loud so my spirit could hear them.
“I said to the Almond tree,
‘Sister, speak to me of God’
And the Almond tree blossomed.”
(From “Report to Greco” by Nikos Kazantzakis)
I felt as if all of life was embedded in those words and I became the Almond tree carrying a message about God.
We are always in the process of blossoming, living within a potential moment of new life and growth. We’re often not aware that this process has begun. It slips into our lives as a quiet moment, or an inspiration. Sometimes it creates a time of insight that takes us by surprise into a new understanding. It has a way of beginning without our knowing the destination to which we are moving.
To blossom is to flower, to be transformed. The message of “blossoming” is spoken in times of growth opening us to the gift and power of new life.
In our poem, the almond tree is intimately addressed as “sister” affirming her feminine voice and our connection as family. Clearly, she is one who knows God and who understands the pathway to God is through the act of “blossoming”. We have become an expression of God in the world.
I sighed and spoke words of thanks to God who is always feeding our heart and spirit. I smiled thinking about the amazing gift I had just been given and felt the lovely peace of gratitude which always calls for prayer:
Dearest God,
Fill me with your love
That I might share it everywhere.
Thank you for your presence
that we might be reborn in your image.
Thank you for blossoming our lives
With your transforming presence.
Amen and Amen.