August 2022
One of my favourite plants is the snowdrop. It spends most of the year as nothing more than a small swollen bulb underneath the dark earth. Time moves on, day to night to day… seasons change from hot to cooler to cold, rains come and go and come again, and nothing much seems to happen around that patch of ground. Where did I plant the snowdrop bulb again?
Life goes on, new decisions are arrived at, new choices made, old stuff is left behind, new plans initiated. Change is constantly with us: some we fear, some welcomed, some just thrust upon us and we are forced into making new choices.
Why, when transformation is happening within us/ for us, do we try and hold it back, to contain it, to try and continue the same old, same old? Why, so often, are we just afraid of change? Why do we attempt to hold back the inner juices of inevitable shift in our being?
The little bulb lying silently underneath the dark earth follows its own apparent inchoate primordial process, doing its own thing: growing roots, and preparing an upward thrust through granules of soil out to the sky beyond; much of which we don’t see until little green leaves appear.
Are we actually any different? Does change in our own life go unnoticed until we find ourselves seemingly suddenly facing unfamiliar new things? Is meeting the sky unfamiliar to the little bulbed one, or is this new stage already known in the fabric of the cells of its being, in its memory of existence itself?
My feeling is that we, like the little plant, have a deep knowing of the nature of transformation and a deep reverence for it. The stuff of religious ideas is emergent from it. The Christ rising from the dead, the miracles of lamas who transmogrify into rainbows, the mysteries of manifestations are all implicit in our ordinary processes of change.
What then, the fear? Much of our lives is spent in trying to hold still the unstoppable. Do we not have faith in natural processes? In the Tao of life?
I like to watch the making of sand mandalas by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Utmost attention is put to each grain of sand rubbed down by vibrations to the patterns forming below. The mandalas are of heavenly architectural buildings representing the dimensions of ourselves. When the “buildings” are made, they are sung over, and then scraped up into a vase and walked down to a river or the sea to be scattered to the beyond. Each act is the letting go of any idea of holding to the unchanged, for all is change, all is flux.
There is something very beautiful in change. The little plant, now growing strongly, forms buds and then, in the miracle of silence, exquisite white flowers come forth: white blossoms with spots of green and a faint perfume. It is a pretty flower, the snowdrop, but so are we as revelations of beings in the process of becoming.
Let’s not be frightened of change. We cannot control every aspect of our lives, and neither is there any benefit in attempting to do so. We can simply acknowledge that the changes that we become aware of have been happening anyway outside our consciousness. It is implicit in the nature of being itself. We cannot control the essence of life because it pulses through us. We are like snowdrop bulbs making flowers in the making of new futures.
