Pot Bound
Confined and constrained,
caught up in old patterns.
Roots wrapped round and round.
Wound so tightly,
there is no room for growth
for breath
for all that might be.
What happens when my voice changes?
And no one likes me.
Can I come unbound
and just see what happens
if I reach for wonder
everyday?
“How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower and choice not to step back into the confining roles we mistakenly believe will keep us safe and protected.”—Dr. Edith Eva Eger, The Choice
I could have stayed in this place all day long.
Watching families choose a Christmas tree. Making wreaths from fresh greenery. Hiking. Sipping cider.
Catching the beauty before it fades away. These are the gifts of the season.
“This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are—along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.
. . . To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance