It’s been a while since I posted. The reason being my heavy immersion in the sublime transition to the next phase of my life.
I’ve mentioned it before. After 11 years I will be leaving my position with an AMAZING organization and lots of friends and colleagues and beginning a new adventure.
It is traumatic and incredibly scary leaving safety, security, meaningful work and good friends and colleagues.
Why then, one might ask, have I chosen to do this?
Because I have a knowing that I’ve done all that I was meant to do there and I have learned all that I was meant to learn there. Now I am ready for what I am meant to do next.
I take with me the lessons, the friends and the many other gifts, too numerous to list, that it has been my privilege to receive.
I know in my heart that it’s time to move on. I know I’m being called to something important. In spite of the fear and the sadness at the impending end of an era – I am overwhelmingly EXCITED.
I am down to one very short month and counting. My successor has been selected. He is wonderful. When I think of handing my “baby” – the network I’ve run for a decade – over to him I feel good. I know it will be good hands.
In early December I leave to spend a full month with my family in Zimbabwe and South Africa. With the Parents. The Siblings. The Big-Boy Nephews. The Itsy-Bitsy Nephews. I will meet in person for the first time, The Littlest-Nephew who is 1. (That kid is in for some serious hugging and kissing of his sweet little cheeks.) I will get to hang out with my cousins and friends I haven’t seen for years. I will spend time in the house I grew up in.
I am apprehensive about what it will be like to be in a Zimbabwe so different from the one I grew up in. These are troubled and difficult times there. I know it will be hard on many levels. But I know the difficulty will be tempered by sweetness of being home with my family.
This may be the longest time I will have spent at home since I left in 1993.
I was originally supposed to make this change in my life in the summer, but for numerous reasons it got pushed back and ended up landing squarely in the Fall.
Since I am letting go of many aspects of my life as I have known it for so long, it seems fitting that it should be happening during this season of release.
Over the past month I’ve been observing the changing landscape daily. First the breathtaking flame of riotous color, followed by the gradual release of leaves from the trees. In the woods behind my house – where raking is not necessary – you can already see the leaves beginning to do the work of feeding the earth in preparation for a festival of new life which will come in the spring.
Yesterday I was thinking how stark the woods looked without their fabulous summer greenery when I happened to look out of my dining room window. There is a gorgeous little babbling brook across the street from my house and I realized that I was seeing it for the first time in many months because the leaves were now bare. So even in the perceived loss of the beauty of summer trees was the gift of now being able to observe the sweet babbling brook.
I know that much of what I am “losing” is making the way clear for me to see amazing new vistas I wouldn’t be able to see otherwise and all that is falling away is fodder for a new season of growth in my life.
All is as it should be!
The babbling brook across the street
