GEOGRAPHY

Knowing  where you are in the world is essential. It affects your ability to live fearlessly and your confidence to create endlessly. If you feel lost, like you’re going absolutely nowhere, like you are bursting with ideas but can’t seem to find a beginning, then knowing your geography and recognizing the season you are in will indeed help you to begin.

If you find that you are in the middle of a vast ocean, lost and directionless among the sparkling blue waves, then what a relief! All one must do is point their ship in any direction and follow the horizon without fail, with steady consistency. Because consistency in any direction, in any way, just like the waves, will eventually lead you to solid ground. However, if you feel lost at sea but are actually in a season of growth, in a new place with new opportunities, you need to stretch out, take root, and stay put. Be willing to grow, be willing to be a process. Start now sowing into what you hope to see when spring comes. Spring — bursting forth with new life and fresh air and the call to new adventures — will come after the trees and the ideas swirling within you have rid themselves of what they no longer need to make room for what is to come. It can be painful and it can be hard. But if you recognize your geography and know that you are part of an orchard, growing steadily day by day, then you can rest assured that you are in the right place at the right time. It is all a part of the process. The change you’re longing for will come soon. Just hold on.

Perhaps instead you find yourself in a place that, no matter how hard you try, you do not see any fruit. You aren’t growing, your roots are not stretching deep. In an orchard this would be devastating and even fatal. But in a desert, as a cactus perhaps, it seems only natural. We all walk through deserts from time to time, wide open plains of dust and dirt. They aren’t the places where we grow the tallest. They aren’t the places where we even get everything we need, but they are the places where we grow in different ways. Deserts are the places that teach us to hold on to what little we have. To be grateful, to understand what we actually need and what we thought we needed, but in reality don’t. Deserts offer a perspective that few other geographical locations do. They are rarely a mountaintop, but they give you a full view of the sun, of a vast land! There is nothing blocking your vision or distracting you, and sometimes those are the places where we need to be — the kind of place and perspective that even the most fruitful orchard could never offer us.

It is essential to know our geography and to be where we are. To truly be, present and ready to invest in our current season of life. If we choose not to, well, we have this bad habit of wishing we were in the places we have already been. But I wonder, if we were to fully show up and be where we are, through the process of growth and change as geography and seasons demand of us, then maybe we wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. And the present season would still prepare us for what is to come. And if fully sown into, then the past season would have prepared us to flourish exactly where we are — whether that be in the middle of the ocean, an orchard, or a barren desert. I do not want to be caught in an orchard unable to grow because I did not learn how to be consistent at sea or grateful in the desert. I want to be where I am, to grow where I am, always knowing the best is yet to come, but fully investing in the purpose of the present.