A look out the front room window. The Wintercreeper below had shrunk; once small leaves tipped in yellow are now naked sticks like pins in a cushion, devoured from top to bottom and from left to right. Reaching tender allium stems next to it topped by fattening buds to soon-to-be flowers like bells . . . gone.
Every spring, my expectations for colorful spring blooms after a long, colorless winter are dashed, thanks to the rabbits, who are as much a part of a spring landscape as tulips, daffodils, and my allium. Rabbits are blossoming, but my spring buds aren’t.
Rabbits and deer are predators to my gardens. I have devoted one flower patch to an often neglected population: bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Plantings there of bee balm and black-eyed Susan, coneflower and lantana, lavender and zinnia are sure to attract the buzzy bugs and the silent-winged ones too. But with the giving flower bed, the rabbits can taketh away.
How our hopes for the expected can be popped in an instant, just as in a quick glance outside, below a window. The disappointment is felt when our expectations are dashed.
My mother used to make negative comments when, let’s say, in the car on a trip to the dentist, “I just know he’ll have to pull that tooth”, or while on an outing shopping for pants, “I can never find anything that fits.” I asked her why she had such a negative outlook. She would tell me because if the outcome is better than she expected, she wouldn’t be disappointed. If it’s a disappointment, no loss there. I guess I couldn’t argue with her logic.
How we may be quick to see the disappointment, but yet don’t acknowledge all that could be possible.
Kierkegaard says we don’t live in certainties. We live in possibilities. I like to think that too, especially when what I expected is not there.
But maybe we should see it as what looks like loss may also be a cue for us to see differently. Even when parts of my garden were stripped, there was something yet for me to see.
With a simple turn of the head, or a scan of the eyes upward, an unexpected, a possibility, can be found.
That morning when I looked out the window to discover what the rabbits left behind (or didn’t!) the rising sun’s blur got my attention skyward. The tops of nestled evergreens and pines across the street waved in slow motion from the wind’s punch. And in the middle, between the cluster of green, a large redbud in deep pink, its color slipped in vertically like a zipper. I don’t recall the color being so vivid, the length of the flowering tree standing so tall among its unflowering neighbors.
In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis’ short work, he suggests disappointment can feel like betrayal when reality refuses the story we believed, a breaking of the trust we placed in how things were supposed to go.
“Live the questions,” accept uncertainty, and don’t look for a resolution. Rainer Maria Rilke, an American-German poet, wants us to be open to the unexpected.
I’ve been reading Emerson lately. He says in his essay, Self-Reliance to trust yourself, the voice that is deep and within you, your intuition. “Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”
Perhaps we should channel a little Emerson the next time we expect a negative outcome and stay positive and in hope for the sun’s light.
Trust yourself. It will keep you steady and allow you to move along without hanging on to an expectation that life has to make sense along the way.
And so I learned that life is less a path that is fixed, but more a broad, open landscape that continues to unfold even when parts of it may have been eaten away.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Sometimes the unexpected can confirm that anything is possible.
For you Wisconsinites and those Up Northerners in Michigan, I’d love to see you!
MAY 2 LAKEFLY BOOK FAIR, OSHKOSH CONVENTION CENTER, Oshkosh, WI
MAY 31 BOOZY BOOK FAIR, Castle Farms, Charlevoix, MI
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