Preparation

It's a single-degree sort of morning with snow blanketing the Colorado landscape out my window. The boys have left for work and school; Jake is snoozing beside me; Christmas music is quietly playing while I journal my heart. Today is week two in the Advent book I am reading -- Behold! Cultivating Attentiveness in the Season of Advent. This week is all about Preparation. Too often for me preparation is a to-do list. It is busy. It is responsibility. It is pressure. But this preparation in Advent should be Quiet. Thoughtful. Relaxed. Joyful. Restorative. 

"I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." (Luke 1:38)

Excerpt from "Behold!:

"Only many years later did I learn the garden wisdom of my great-aunt. It took a while for me to understand what she knew about preparing a garden for the winter season. It took some time for me to discover what she had learned about "abandoning" the soil, space, and the plants she spent so much time loving well from spring through autumn. She knew and was teaching me that it was God's season for working the garden. Aunt Lylla was turning over the preparation to God. Aunt Lylla was, in a deep way, abandoning the beauty and health of her garden to the One who first created it. My great-aunt had come to understand from a life of practice that while we could behold little above ground in the brittle, dying remnants of her garden as winter took its turn, plenty of life-giving growth, beauty, and change was taking place in the deep, dark earth below where we walked."