Around this time last spring, my sister and I were regularly driving south from Louisville to care for an elder relative in a nursing home, newly transferred there after a difficult hospital stay. It was a heavy season punctuated by night shifts and priest visits. Late winter dragged on, relationships were strained, and the emotional weight of caretaking, hovered over everything.

But those car rides south became something a balm. We shared silence, venting, laughing, and those little exchanges only sisters can fully understand.

One day, we took a different route along the Ohio River and winding through limestone cliffs and pockets of forest and farmland. As we crested a hill, the road opened into a wide vista. There, sprawling fields were carpeted in a brilliant purple blanket of deadnettle or henbit. It was so unexpectedly vivid it struck me like a joke. I laughed out loud. After months of dull, colorless weather, it was like my brain had suddenly switched to technicolor.

That’s when I started to notice the redbuds. Since moving back east, they’ve quickly become my favorite tree. Their bright pink blossoms pierced the gray landscape like exclamation points. They were a stark reminder that change was already underway, even if I hadn’t caught up yet. I am always struck by the ability of my experiences with nature to awaken me. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "the beauty of the Earth is a bell of mindfulness".

I instinctively began to recite a mantra, trying to anchor the beauty I was seeing to something sacred. And in that moment, I realized how often I only reach for mantra in times of stress. For example, when I’m overwhelmed, afraid, or desperate for comfort. But what if I turned to mantra just as readily in awe? What if I let it be a way to meet beauty, to praise and give thanks, not just to soothe or stabilize?

Post-ashram life had been unfolding exactly how you might expect. Horizontal concerns were creeping in, familial and financial karma catching up, old patterns flaring up in the mirrors of close relationships. But I try to orient my perspective around the fact that spiritual life is not linear. There are cycles of death and rebirth. And I have the give of watching that truth play out through the changing of the seasons. I know that it is good, necessary, even, for something to die in order to make way for the new.

That spring, I had recently completed a Compassion Cultivation Training at the local Tibetan Buddhist temple, an eight-week program that invited me to return to meditation with a beginner’s mind. Our facilitator reminded us: "every breath can be a new beginning."

I think about all the phases I've been through, times when I meditated daily, weekly, or not at all. But I always came back. And what is that if not a microcosm of meditation itself? The coming back is the practice. Every breath can be a new beginning. At any time, you can shift your perspective and start over. It’s the cosmic dance. A cyclical fall from grace that allows us to experience union, over and over again.

Now, each time I spot an eastern redbud along the road, I take it as a cue. They don’t grow densely enough to fade into the background, so each one feels like a little pink hand-wave from the universe. A reminder to come back to the present. To breathe. To begin again.

Have you recently been moved by beauty, awe, or the changing seasons? Spiritual direction can help you listen more deeply to what those moments are saying. Book a free intro call today!