Hope springs eternal. The new shoots of spring are popping up everywhere. Inspired by their determination to push up through the hard and still almost frozen ground , I start looking for these shoots throughout my garden and along the walkways.

When life gets hard, with challenges in every direction, I start looking for what new is being born, what else is happening outside the attention getting news or the last event in my life where I may feel stopped by “facts of the matter.”  

Garden season is upon us. Some of us attend to our ‘patch of ground’with our passions and desires to create with Mother Nature. We can be pretty sure there will always be a surprise (or two or 10) in the coming season. 

Without fail, even if there are many  challenges, life finds a way to give its thrust out from the seeds. With the tiniest support from us, that little seed reaches for moisture and warmth, grows roots, gets stronger below the surface until the time comes to shoot up through the soil to the sun.

It takes some time for the seed to settle, and nature takes her to work relationally with whole of life.  

It takes vast varieties of life forms to realize even one shoot and then to grow into maturity where an exponentially growing reality presents again and again. By cooperation

and collaboration, each agent is autonomously becoming itself. No controller or organizer. Together with infinite living forms, dancing their unique dance and song to fulfill their essence, we humans get to receive nature’s infinite bounty and beauty. 

When life oscillates,moves like a river with ever new rivers flowing into it, I have come to trust that the creative in life is forming new ways to push past the obstacles.

When I look at the bigger picture of living processes everywhere, I don’t just believe this to be true, I see the real  “facts of the matter”of life creating us all, with us all and through nature’s all. 

I take great comfort is the ‘force’ of nature. And sometimes those new ways will come from within me, like new shoots coming alive.  

So, every day I’ll keep looking for the new shoots humans are creating everywhere, too. 

I’m looking deeper, closer,wider, under rocks and even up in the sky. I can hear the whisper of life, a mighty forcethat lives in each of us. Humans are making choices,becoming themselves, their essence, and that cannot be stopped any more than that seed in the ground. 

It’s mine to choose to give it my attention. It’s my own force of nature.

Skye HIrst lives in the Midcoast and owns Just in Time Conversations