Below The Surface
how patience is a power move.
I’d never look at a daffodil bursting through the earth in the spring and criticize it for not blooming sooner. Knowingly, I am above the snow and grasp that the flower won’t survive in any season other than the one intended for it to bloom. It’s effortless for me to witness, above the soil. Below—unseen, within the flower’s seed—is where the effort unfolds.
And the daffodil isn’t the whole garden. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. If the garden were filled with multitudes of daffodil bulbs, it would bloom once for a couple of weeks each spring and be void of color for the rest of the warm season, leaving us with only a short period of beauty—and then disappointment thereafter.
A well-cultivated garden blooms in stages. The crocuses first, followed mid-spring by tulips and irises. Into summer, the perennials—phlox and daylilies—take the stage. Ending in autumn, the asters and chrysanthemums bring the color until the light changes, frost settles in, and all is quiet until the ground thaws once again.
This knowledge is useful to a gardener—which I was not—until Aaron and I bought a house and he engineered our landscaping in such a way that gives us bursts of color from April all the way to October. He prunes and relocates plants each year to give them more water or less, more light or less, more acidic soil or less—all tailored to each plant’s ideal growth environment.
The process is cyclical and unstoppable. We can either accept it and cultivate it, or fight it all winter long. But it happens all the same. The beauty of the garden come springtime depends on our willingness to work with what we have.
I loathe the phrase “trust the process” because it’s hardly fun to be buried beneath the snow in the messy middle of a dormant phase—when the power of what lies within is felt and waiting to burst through. The process tells me that dormancy exists and is also necessary, and I am a wisher of summer year-round. Our culture, too, encourages this in me.
At age 24, when I thought to run across America for my mom, I wished I had thought of it sooner.
When my relay team launched and I spent years obsessing over an exceptional runner experience, I wished I had taken steps quicker.
When I finally made that phone call I knew I had to make—but waited and waited hours until I couldn’t possibly put it off any longer—I wished I had called earlier.
Hiring. Sooner.
Leadership. Sooner.
Writing my book. Sooner.
Payroll. Sooner.
Launching my blog. Sooner.
Public speaking. Sooner.
Publishing my book. Sooner.
Somehow, miraculously, I arrived at a place where I’ve stopped telling myself anything should be happening sooner than it is. I choked out the weeds urging me out into the snow and wrote down Divine Timing as the number one bullet point in my personal and business strategic plan. This doesn’t absolve me of the hard work of cultivation. Rather, it shows me how to work better with what I’m given.
I learned to deeply cherish the mysterious, quiet place of a dark, frozen ground.
And that’s when the Gardener said, “It’s time.”