Observing Nature Helps Us Hold Things Gently

Do you ever notice how some flowers close tight on rainy or cold days, then open again as the sun shines? 

I've enjoyed watching our Star of Bethlehem flowers as they are bold and beautiful one day, closed up tight the next. The second photo is not the bud stage. It's actually the same plant, just with closed petals on a chilly, cloudy day.

Naturalists don't exactly why flowers close at night or during cloudy days. It might be because insects that spread their pollen aren't active then. Closing at night may also protect the pollen from unwanted pests.

This opening and closing is a great metaphor for our own processes of becoming more whole. Some days we remain open-hearted and flexible, and some days we need to close up, guard our growing, and not share our truth or our tentative understandings. Such musing reminds me of one of my favorite poems during spiritual direction training. Whether or not you are religious, and even though de Chardin wrote some 95 years ago, this poem contains much wisdom appropriate for today. 

The poem contains the same message that was offered to me by wisdom teachers and what I offer to others: be gentle with yourself and observe nature. Observing nature helps us hold things gently. Life is beautiful and fragile. If you would never force open or punish a bud for not blooming fast enough why would you do the same to yourself? Everyone who observes nature knows prying open a bud or chrysalis brings instant death for flower and butterfly. Linger over this poem, translate it into a soul language that fits where you are, and then go out and enjoy some nature as you celebrate your becoming.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.