I planted Pennisetum xadvena “Fireworks” fountain grass in the middle of red million bells.
I got on the elevator with Bonnie this morning, pulling my mask up and in place because our neighbor got on too with her two elderly pups. “I slept in,” said this woman we discovered has a PhD and stunning career. Smiling (which she couldn’t see) because it was only 7, I suggested that was probably hard for her. “Yes. Hard to sit still. It’s my Puritan work ethic.”
Some things are hard. Life and work as a strategist have shaped me to see the flag in the ground miles away, and tread quickly and efficiently toward it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m not so good at being in the middle of. It can be a messy and chaotic, tangled, exhausting place.
I’m learning it can be a place of beauty. Life is rarely perfect. It happens in the middle of…not as the prize beneath the flag. It’s light in dark. Like crystal chandeliers hanging in the middle of a barn.
So we planned a meal and set a beautiful table for our kids on a stage with sad floors, a door-sized, plastic-covered hole in the middle of the dining room wall and displaced furniture. There’s a water problem in the stacks.
I’m learning it can be a sacred space as I watch sisters give up their beds and rest to provide care through the middle of the night for a loved one.
And I’m learning life in the middle of might be the highest and best place. Like streams cutting through the desert.
