Dailypost Word Prompt: Year

Happy New Year. Each year has it share of memories – and this year is no different. I have many highlights that I want to remember, and I will do that elsewhere in my journal. This journal entry is to find my word for the next 365-page chapter of my life.

I have nourished my heart since it broke over seven years ago. I have coaxed it to keep beating – I used every trick in the book. I have searched and searched for what it would need to keep going, something beyond the love of my family, although that was a huge part in its survival. It needed more, away to remove the broken shards and make room for something new – someone new.

My word then was love. Love was what those closest to me needed from me, and I was too broken to give it – but I wanted too. When my heart broke, my prayer to God was for him to teach me how to love through the grief. And although I wanted to learn it for my family, what had happened in the process was I learned to love myself. The first step in loving others is to love oneself – the true self.

Love was the seed and deep under the surface of the new ground cleared lies a brand new me – the real me. I can feel the beginning of a shoot ready to burst from the shell of that seed and I long to break through the soil and feel the warmth of the sun.

I am resisting the urge to spur ahead and speed up the process. I have done that one too many times over the last six years. The shift that I have become aware of is not only the seed ready to burst, but there are also tiny roots pushing deeper into the soil, I need to allow time for these roots to take hold. I need to allow the roots to anchor myself in the soil of my self-love – and this takes time.

Every new year begins during the season of winter – cold, damp and raw. It is a time of critical growth – unseen growth. It is the time when I am to allow all that I have learned, all that I have cherished and all that I long to be to nourish the ground where the seed’s roots feed. The new does not start when the sprout peeks it leaves out for the first time in spring; it started long before in the dark cold days of January.

As a gardener, I know this to be true, but as a seed I forget. I am too impatient and want instant gratification – it has taken so long. This New Year I will step down as the gardener, and I will allow the Master Gardener to take over.

He is also the Master Storyteller. At the start of every story, there is an event, but a story is about people. Somewhere within the many chapters of one’s life story, a chapter has to be about that transition of the focus of the event to the person and how the event molded the person into someone new.

The first word of my new chapter is “rebirth.”