Hey, friends! In November of 2020, I shared this on my Still Chasing Fireflies Facebook page, and the words have been on my heart this weekend as I prepare for my second covid vaccine tomorrow. Nature reveals so much to us in its patience and its promises. I hope you enjoy revisiting these words with me!

From November 2020:

With more time at home this fall, I finally remembered to buy spring bulbs.

I intend to buy them every year, but I always forget until spring, when I observe other people’s blooms with regret. So tonight, with Tom Petty’s voice in my ear, I worked my fingers through the cool dirt.

With all of the bulbs dumped together onto the soil, I broke up the thick clumps of earth and carefully worked to hide each delicate bulb from the light. Gently, I nestled each baby flower into it’s own dark pit, buried each one in its own hole, alone.

And I thought to myself, “We just have to make it to spring, little bulbs.”

We just have to hang on until the sun warms the earth, and we emerge from our holes, and life will look normal again. We just need to be patient. We just need to trust that spring will come. We just need to embrace the quiet and store up our energy and expect to grow.

And imagine…. When all of these flowers erupt from their lonely dark places to dance in the sunshine with the other bounty of the earth… And when our doors are finally propped open, welcoming parties of friends and family without worry once again…

Hang on, friends. Use the next few months of dark times to grow more beautiful. It’s painful. It’s tiring. It’s hard to understand.

But nature is full of answers. So choose to bloom.

Spring is coming…

Guess what, you guys?!? SPRING IS HERE! We made it! Tomorrow I will get my second vaccine, just as my bulbs are sending gorgeous green shoots up through the soil. Somehow spring has extra special meaning this year.

While it is certainly tempting to ONLY look forward as the blossoms erupt and the front doors swing open, especially since reflecting on the past year elicits AT LEAST a little bit of pain for most of us, these days between vaccines have been an important time of reflection for me. I’ve spent some time reflecting on what the challenges, the losses (from the annoying ones to the truly devastating ones), and the conflicts of the last year revealed about who I am at my very core. I recently and intentionally took some time to revisit all of my blog posts, all of my personal social media posts, all of my comments on my pages from the last year – and I thought about who those words revealed me to be. Where do I see evidence that I have grown in my faith, my knowledge, my generosity, and my love for others? When do I feel confident that I was I assertive at the right time, for the right reasons, and in the right way, and when did I completely miss the mark? When adversity hits us again – and it will – how do I want to react differently?

I learned several years ago that when adversity hits, it evokes intense emotions, and intense emotions strip us of our filters. In that way, adversity shines a light on who we really are, at our core, at that moment in time.

It’s no fun going through hard times. But hard times do have the potential to change who we are, and in a good way. But that change is impossible if we refuse to look in the rearview mirror, at least for a minute.

I hope that you, too, will take a little bit of time to reflect on the past as life begins to look more normal. And I hope you are as excited to see the spring blooms as I am!

Enjoy the sunny blue skies. Enjoy the colorful new life erupting from the earth. And TREASURE the hugs of friends and family as soon as its safe – and I hope for you that is SOON! I have a greater appreciation for smiles and hugs than I ever did before!

HAPPY SPRING!

~Mary Ann