In The Honeysuckle
My youngest turned 19…marking the beginning of my last year as a mother of a teenager. It’s so funny to think how quickly it flies. When I was pregnant with her, I had her sisters praying that “the baby would come when the lilacs are in bloom.” Lilacs were my favorite and as a little girl I used to hang out and read inside the big bush in my backyard. Lilacs were a symbol of imagination and safety and beauty. So it was that every night for two weeks we prayed for her to be born but to no avail. I was due at the end of May and I was over being pregnant, still May came and went and the lilacs passed and it was June.
It appeared that God had other plans and after a near death experience she was born during peony and honeysuckle season. Also beautifully fragrant like lilacs and just as fleeting. I had no idea that honeysuckle would become the new bush I’d hang out under but here we are! Now, I listen to the bees who are SO grateful that they just let me move through the bush and watch them work. My little happy friends.
It makes me think of what God is inviting me to, in his natural world, separated from our manufactured drama. What happens in the honeysuckle is miraculous and deeply private between bee and flower, and the joy that can be heard there makes me want to stay. It’s otherworldly and mystifying as the fragrance is so layered and thick that it makes me feel I can get a little tipsy by it, but it still grounds me in reality. It reminds me that despite my desires, God propels me where God wants, when God wants.
This morning the honeysuckle began to drop, encouraged by the winds, it creates its own “rain” and just like that, it is the beginning of the end of honeysuckle season. So, too, I am sensing the beginning of the end of one season of my life as I move into another. I’m not sure what that will look like now but I know that it will include even more time in the natural world. I know that there are other places to “pollinate” and just as God chose the time with my youngest, I know God will choose the best time for me now.
