This week we started checking things off our "one day we will ___" list. There are things that will need to wait on a better immune system and time away from the hospital. But the little things...they are just as satisfying and special to complete as that someday trip to Hawaii.
In almost 10 years of living in Texas, my favorite time here is still April. Suddenly each year, almost over night, the fields turn the most beautiful blue, as the Texas state flower pops to life. They are short lived little beauties and the spring weather often determines just how bright, how dense, and how long they last. In the bluebonnet weeks in Texas, I am a happy girl. Visually, there is nothing better to me, in the land of hot and red brown earth that comes too soon in summer months. I know I'm not alone, because the tradition of parading your family out into the blanket of blue flowers to snap a few photos continues every year.
If you aren't from Texas, or maybe even if you are, the Texas folklore of bluebonnets may not be something familiar. There is a wonderful written version of the tale by Iron Thunderhorse. I recommend reading that version (http://acqtc.org/Articles/SheWhoIsAlone) because I can't do the same justice to the tale, but let me summarize it here in my own words.
Legend has it, that during a great drought, in what is now Texas, the Comanche people were starving. Despite being a skilled and thriving tribe, people were dying. They would dance, pray, and chant for rain to come, asking the Great Spirit to save them. One day the medicine man had returned from his secluded hill with a message from the Master of Life: the people had become proud and selfish, careless with the land entrusted to them. For rain to come, they would need to choose their most prized possessions to sacrifice into the great fire as an offering.
The people were happy for a hopeful word, until they realized what was being asked. They were not willing to give up their things. No one would come forward with an offering until, overnight, a small orphaned girl who had lost her parents in the famine, named She-Who-Is-Alone, decided to make the ultimate sacrifice herself. With boundless love for the collective tribe, she took her blue feathered doll, the one possession left from her parents, to the fire on the hill, and laid it down in the flames as a sacrifice.
She watched it burn. Watched the fire die out. Collected the cold ashes of her once doll, the material memories of her family, and cast them out into the wind, spreading them to all corners of the hill. And then she collapsed and slept.
When the tribe awoke, much to their surprise, a blanket of blue flowers was engulfing the hill. As blue as the little girl's feathered doll. And soon the rains began. The little girl had given of herself, creating a new reality and ensuring survival for her tribe.
Every year I say we need to make time to take bluebonnet photos. Every year I feel the rush of excitement when I see them spring out of the ground, but I've been working weekends for years, and before I know it, the last of the beauties fade into a memory. Last April, as we were driving to appointments, chasing a diagnosis that everyone thought was cancer but couldn't pin down, the dark outcomes, the possibility of losing the love of my life would creep in.
I cried, one day driving down the road, knowing another spring of bluebonnets with Wil had come to a close, and that another spring was never guaranteed. Our dreams and hopes...our survival...assaulted. So this year, when the opportunity arose for pictures, I sweet talked the hubby into crossing it off our list.
Last night we had a magical moment in a field of blue. We are always mildly uncomfortable with photos, wishing like most of you that we were this or that weight, had better hair or outfit, etc. Yesterday though, once on scene, we no longer cared about body composition or if one of us still has hair and eyebrows...instead, our hearts just wanted spring 2014 documented, as it is right now...full of love, sometimes fear, complicated loveliness that is a journey alongside cancer treatment...because we are still here, together. Some imperect perfection among the most beautiful sign of life that Texas bestows upon us each year. A little slice of life without thoughts about leukemia, statistics, side effects, meds...just a simple moment of life.
And so I cried all the way to my sister's house after we left the shoot, reading the letter she had left for us with the photographer. Crying because Wil is still here, with no guarantees, with good days and bad days and everything in between...happy for just this exact moment in time.
I wish I was as selfless as She-Who-Is-Alone. In my life, I have probably identified more with the adults in the tribe--Not wanting to give away what I think is my right to keep, trying to hold tight, in a time of depletion, to what is known. Clinging desperately to the life I wanted, instead of giving of myself with no strings attached, and casting the ashes of my former life into the wind. She-Who-Is-Alone had the courage to let go of the pieces of her beloved past so she could become present and loving in her current situation. Her grit let a new, unknown, and prosperous life rise from the remains. And so it came to be that the tribe gave her a new name: She-Who-Loved-Her-People.
The Comanche believe that the bluebonnets, born out of the ultimate sacrifice, are here for us as a sign that, despite loss and struggle, rain and survival will surely come. All it takes is the ability to take judgements about our circumstances and replace them with compassion, both to ourselves and others; To free ourselves of reactivity to what life asks of us and find a way to relate differently to the facts of our current situation; To hold to the process, the twists and turns of life, rather than a two dimensional goal. Those three qualities change us, change our purpose, and open us up for what is next.
For Wil and I, its like the universe aligned for us both this week. It's like we have both walked up the hill now, tired of starving, in the quiet night of our new normal, and gently laid down former expectations, watching them disintegrate before us. Not because we don't love what we have had in our life B.C. And not because we don't still mourn for the little pieces lost. It has been a subtle shift, a realignment. It's time to take handfuls of black dust and see where the breeze will take them. The sunrise of our new dawn is still uncharted territory. But I have a feeling, that just beyond what we can see now, there is an amazing sea of azure petals just waiting for our arrival. I am anxiously awaiting the April of our life to begin.
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