There are two yellow crocus blooming beneath the Arkansas Black apple tree which grows just feet away from the compost area in my back gardens; the garlic I plant each October beneath the same tree are also pushing green spears up into the increasing sunlight.
Along the path to the front door there are purple crocus budding, and around the beautiful linden tree, a ring of daffodils that once followed its baby-canopy (so, planted a decade or so ago in a tight circle,) are rising daily. Those daffodils need dividing and planting on, something I never got to last year though I fully intended to. They will, of course, fulfill their lives just fine without my intervention. Life is like that. Life fulfills life.
I have been thinking a lot about accomplishment and fulfillment. The words just dance after me all day: well, “fulfillment” dances; “accomplishment” marches. You can already tell, three paragraphs in, where I am going with this, can’t you?
I am someone who has always accomplished things, and mostly believed that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to and, honestly, I often did. My daughter-in-law might point out that this is because I am a Capricorn; teachers of the Enneagram would point to my “Achiever” energy; Meyers-Briggs advocates would nod to the “strong J” in my INFJ personality. All three things are probably true. Psychologically, though, I think I was hoping that one of the people I loved most in the world would see, approve, and say so; the final bit of that wish never was granted because it was not in the make-up of that person, no matter what I did or did not do. It took me six decades of growth to realize that and release us both from the tangled ropes of my own expectations.
Now that I am becoming an elder, I am (so gratefully) beginning to understand about fulfillment. What a beautiful word: filled with fullness. Like a flower unfolding in its season; like a tree being tree from seed, to sapling, to mother, and grandmother, to an ancient forest and life holding one; like a human being born, becoming, and fully-experiencing my own deeply sensing, feeling, loving, human, life.
I have marched through much of my life to human-society’s rhythm of accomplishment, marking the seasons with boxes checked, degrees and certificates earned, tasks completed. I know how to do this. I am sort of wired for it with my organized mind and task-oriented personality. It is a good skill, but it is only a skill, and while it may be lauded as a virtue by the capitalist society we have created, it is not a “moral good,” it is only a skill. I am grateful for it, and grateful to finally put it in its correct place.
I am coming to understand that human life is really about fulfillment. Like all of nature, we only become “we” through fertilization, through a coming together, a joining together of two completely separate animals. Our mammalian bodies form within another body and survive only if we are fed our mother’s milk, and are kept warm and safe as infants. We are born into families, and raised and formed in community with one another. Our lives are meant to be filled with the fullness of life: to experience our life-span with all its joy and grief, pain and healing, fear and love. Somewhere, and somehow, human consciousness became conscious of its own spirit, and the spirit of all things, and the Great Spirit in which all have our being.
Life is a dance of wonderful simple complexity.
Several months ago now I did some very profound work with a trusted shaman; that work continues to unfold in me, it continues to lead me in a dance of fulfillment of my own “I am.” I realized this as I drove yesterday to meet and celebrate a beloved’s birthday (a couple weeks later than the actual date.) As I drove I was having a conversation with myself.
“Do you see who you are?” I asked. And then answers came. Words were said aloud, and recognized as true. Nothing more to accomplish. Life to fulfill. Life to fulfill. May it be so.
Courage my dears. Love one another.
