Repotting

You see your pots overflowing with twisted vines spilling outwards in all directions. Leaves stained, hanging on, begging to remember as their chlorophyll wanes and their browned edges encroach on their livelihood. You peer down at the soil caked tight and firm, but a year ago, was fluffed with nourishment, promising an abundant army of sprouts ready to serve you with fresh oxygen to fuel thoughts of clarity.

The season now begs for your reassessment, for you to dig your hands into the very bottom crevices of the mind and pull apart clumps of inertia, of good intentions turned stale. What lives under your fruit and its leaves, the parts revealed to your eyes, lives your foundation, your ground of becoming. Your truest, purest, divine version.

This is not for the weak. For to disrupt a seemingly fine container of a life takes courage, knowing, not yet what you will find, but trusting that the unearthing will yield something designed for you. Your efforts, your sweat, the specks of dirt dusting your hair, your clothes, staining your feet and encircling every cuticle of your nails will remind you of your efforts made with no promise of your manifestations made true.

Yet you take each pot, housing last year’s evolutions, and you thank them. Thank every leaf, every stem they served you with their life, brought beauty and fresh air to your being, without attachment to your productions. Then comes the challenge, the hardest part of letting go. Of pulling up these sprouts to reveal their roots knotted and deep. A rough assessment requiring pulling and turning and lifting and shaking to reveal their nerves so intertwined and in need of parsing. You locate the end leave and follow their siblings through the vine, around another, finally to the root to see the very origin and intention. You could never have predicated the number of leaves, or the direction of the vine based on this one lane of intent. For some are robust, eager for new minerals to carry into the next endeavor, your warrior plants who embody your purpose, in need of a larger pot; perhaps to house this year’s possibilities.

So you honor it with more room, fresh soil and introduce it to a new corner to to entice the sun. It begs you to let it thrive, yet you cannot control or predict its future. It looks so lonely in its new world, a few strong short vines on a barren planet. “I trust what is your fate is meant to be,” You say, “It is not yet for me to know.”

You look at the other vines that were spilling out of the pot just yesterday and find that they had led to nowhere in particular. Their roots detached, or in a knot suffocating others. And while they housed plenty of leaves, some as large as your palm, they had achieved their maximum. They were now turning burnt at the tip and speckled in their center. Hanging on because you hadn’t had the heart to clip them free. You must bid them goodbye. Retire them back to their beginning. Their return to soil, becoming food for a next life. Their valiant efforts recognized; appreciated. Yet in order for surprises and revelations to arrive, they must be liberated from your grasp of old expectations. Can you discharge them of their duty, knowing not if your new efforts will live or die, thrive or suffer?

Is there ever really suffering if you trust? Is there ever really dying if everything returns to the soil that nourishes the new cycle?

Then remain bold. Remain playful with a gambler’s eye. Observe each new leaf with wonder. That’s the point. Fear not of reassessments; of flowers not yet bloomed. You’re missing the point if you only appreciate the fruit, or the overflow. Each new eager sprout, each yellow limp one, offers you a possibility to witness your own growth. Your soul’s expansion out in this life and your inevitable return to its origin.