A friend offered me this greeting in an email she sent somewhere within the array of days surrounding Christmas and New Year’s. I loved it…both the simplicity of it and the depth. It was especially fitting in that the last time we had talked, I was not having a good day and was in a mood of which I am capable, but certainly not proud. The greeting felt like a hand extended, a page turned, the memory of a beam of sunlight on a blue skies day.

I drove to see her yesterday and all feels well and reconciled, for which I am grateful. Before we got together, I went into a nearby cemetery, as I often do. It’s a space I have come to love in all seasons. The trees are large and branchy…in full glorious greenery during spring and summer, juggling the wind among their varied leaves. In autumn, it becomes a, organically littered metallic ocean, a sliding scale of red-orange-yellow-copper lapping at feet and ankles. Winter is an opportunity to appreciate the ‘inner life,’ the scaffolding, the structure, of the sentinels that keep watch over their charges.

There are visible twists and bends in their bodies that are not usually revealed–evidence of life lived among the elements, among Truth and Real. There are some broken bits and dangling bits, waiting for a gust of wind. There are many branches that look to me as though they are waiting for the rest of the tree to move her roots and get ready to pirouette, to spin, to stretch from their centre core up to twig and tendril, curving gently to cradle grace and space and beauty.

All of that is familiar to me…and yet something new caught me yesterday. I love how that can happen. I began looking not just at the branches themselves, grey silhouetted against the grey, but rather Through them. When I adjusted my focus that way, I began to see signs of life that extended beyond the limbs themselves. From where I stood, half tucked into a large shrub, I could count no fewer than 7 bird’s nests. One, the hot tub sized eagle nest, always stands out…but there were many others. Shelters nestled into crooks and bends. Resting places from which new life is nourished, new life rises, and new life moves on–sometimes to return. I loved that this particular place, this cemetery, has above it an avian aerie of diverse species within an arboreal community that covers a swath of taxonomy. Seems fitting, somehow, that life rises here…that the diversity of lives represented below nourishes a diversity of life that both watches over it and blooms forth from it. The cycle of it all…moods, lives, plants, humans, animals.

Happy New Everything.