In the middle of something whole.
We are always in the middle of something.
Even when it doesn't feel that way. Even when life seems to plateau or pause or hold its breath. Underneath the stillness, change is already in motion; replacing, renewing, remaking itself without being asked.
Take your body. Your skin is not the skin you had last year. Your blood is not the same blood. Even your bones, which feel like the most permanent thing about you, are slowly, quietly remaking themselves.
Spring returns. We do not. You are, in the most literal sense, not the same person who stood in this yard last Spring. And neither is the rest of you. You have lived another year, loved through it, lost a little sleep over it. The children you are raising or teaching are not the same either. Longer-limbed. Further along. Carrying something new in their eyes.
We are always in the middle of something whole. And we have our own seasons. Humans carry the longest childhood in the animal kingdom; an extended, unhurried, stretching-toward-the-light unfolding. We are, perhaps more than any other species, built for a long becoming.
Becoming does not mean we are incomplete. A seed cracking open is not broken. It is wholly itself, doing exactly what it is meant to do. So are we. So are the children in our care. Wholeness is not something we arrive at, it is something we already are, even now, in the middle of all our growing.
Which is why this season asks something of us. Not just the raking and the replanting and the shaking out of rugs, but a more interior kind of tending. It becomes less about fixing or filling what is missing, and more about noticing what is already there. The particular way a child lights up over something small; the quiet knowing that lives inside you if you slow down enough to hear it.
Inner tending. That attentive, unhurried turning toward oneself and toward the ones we love.
The question Spring keeps asking is: what does this life need right now? Not the soil you offered last year, not the soil you imagine offering someday, but now, this Spring, with this child, in this particular and unrepeatable moment?
Life is creative, fundamentally and stubbornly, and it asks us to be present to it. To notice what is trying to emerge, in our children and in ourselves. Presence is not a destination. It is a practice of returning, like the season itself. You wander away, and then you come back. You get busy, and then you slow down and look. You find yourself standing in the yard at dusk, watching the light hold on just a little longer than yesterday, and something in you remembers what this is all for.
Children are not unfinished adults. They are in the middle of something whole. And the people who love and teach them are the conditions in which that wholeness deepens.
We are nature. Not observers of it, not visitors, but part of it. How do we live this truth with them? We go outside and get our hands in the dirt. We slow down long enough to watch a beetle cross a stone. We let a child lead us somewhere we wouldn't have thought to go. We notice aloud, ‘look at that, something is growing here’, and in doing so, we teach them that noticing is worthwhile. That paying attention is its own kind of intelligence. That we are part of all of this, not apart from it.
Children learn wholeness not from being told they are whole, but from watching the adults they love treat their own life, their own becoming, as something worth tending. And perhaps the most quietly powerful thing we can share is letting them see us doing our own inner work. Pausing. Noticing. Returning to ourselves with the same gentleness we hope to guide in them. In an uncertain world, that steadiness, that willingness to gently return, may be the most important thing we can offer right now.
Not forcing or fixing, but creating the warmth, the space, the faithful return in which life can do what life does best.
What are you nurturing right now — in the children you love, and in yourself?
What is asking for your attention?
What, if you slowed down long enough, might you notice is already there?
