And

What happens in the in-betweens?

I turned to Ecclesiastes last night (and it wasn't the "everything is meaningless" that drew me there, thank you very much), and I noticed that all the stuff in the "time for everything" passage is a dichotomy: birth and death, reap and sow, cry and laugh, embrace and push away, love and hate. And I started trying to fill in the "and."

Obviously there are some that don't lend themselves to have an in-the-middle. But what do you do with the ones you can put in? The active ones are very definite: birth, death, plant, harvest, search, give up, construct, destroy - you can mark them on a calendar, send a save-the-date, narrow it down to the moment when you say "It's time."

But so much can happen in that little "and." The most I've ever grown is cherry tomatoes in a bucket, but there's a lot of watering, weeding, and WAITING that happens between planting and harvesting. In the middle of actively looking for something and abandoning the search, there are countless restless nights of "is this worth finding?" The waiting between healing and killing is just an unpredictable as waiting for bucket tomatoes, and infinitely more crucial.

And the "and" between the two most chaotic upheavals of a human existence - birth and death - is that exhilarating, terrifying, outrageous quest that we call life.

Where is the season for the "ands?" Is the "and" the year in which the seasons are constantly rotating? Are we constantly waiting, planning, being silent, contemplating, watching, living, and only making a big deal out of the seasons because they're a break in the monotony. Next to this passage, a younger me jotted down, "Life is not constant - you will always experience shifting circumstances." But maybe life is what remains constant. It's the drumbeat of our existence, ticking along through the whole song to the metronome of our heartbeats. Maybe it's the "times," the seasons, that provide the melody.

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven:
A time to be born and (LIVE) a time to die,
A time to plant and (WAIT) a time to harvest,
A time to kill and (WATCH) a time to heal,
A time to tear down and (PLAN) a time to build up,
A time to cry and (BE SILENT) a time to laugh,
A time to grieve and (PACE) a time to dance,
A time to scatter stones and (LEAVE STONES - pick your battles) a time to gather stones,
A time to embrace and (STAND THERE) a time to turn away,
A time to search and (WONDER) a time to quit searching,
A time to keep and (REMINISCE) a time to throw away,
A time to tear and (PUT TO USE) a time to mend,
A time to love and (BE) a time to hate,
A time for war and (SURVIVAL) a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-8