My mind is buzzing with all sorts of ideas this morning. Like the life around me, it seems busy, random, and distracted but really they are all interrelated thoughts working towards love and giving back to life. I am grateful for spring mornings when I can sit on my deck and take in the re-emergence of a bustle of life. In Florida, there’s an abundance of life year round, but the intensity of its sound, colors, activity and life-forms change.

We had some pretty severe storms over the weekend. In some places around town, trees even came down. It was our first big storm of the year after a cool, dry winter. Storms are cleansing in many ways. The heavy rains wash things away (like the pollen, thank goodness!) and quench the thirst of the crunchy ground, turning it green. The winds eliminate many of the dead branches from trees and the ground is covered with them. If they were left there (if humans didn’t pick them up and put them out for the yard waste truck), they’d offer life to insects and what not and eventually become compost, with the potential to feed new, emerging life.

And so from this, I come to think about some of the theology that I laid out on Sunday- the dynamics between the forces of creation and destruction. But I think I chose the wrong word– “destruction”. In fact, I’m reminding myself once again to get out of binary thinking (good vs bad, black vs white– it’s at the root of our white supremacist culture). Instead, I should use “transformation”. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. (I still connect with what I like to call, after much influence from our beloved elder Keyno Hicks, a “creating spirit”, but I’m trying not to get too distracted here!)

Ideas that support the “old ways” can be like the branches- after they’ve served their purpose, they fall to the ground during a storm of change, but not disappearing, just feeding new life. But you know, amongst the dead branches that fell on my deck, there were plenty of new, fresh boughs of leaves that also fell. Not all new ideas work either. But, we have to try them.

There is power within ideas. Ideas can build systems, structures, and policy, and those things influence our behavior. Power is then given, taken, hoarded, hard to come by, or leveled and evenly distributed. What kind of power gives life?

We are in a great storm of change. The waters are heavy, they weigh us down, even drowning some folx. The winds are forcing a change in direction. It feels like the emergence of life is right there on the horizon, though. It’s an opportunity for much transformation. What dead branches will fall and give way to new life, even helping to nourish the new ideas that can give more? What new ideas aren’t working and need to go back into the compost, boosting growth with the nutrients of mistakes? There is always hope, because there is only transformation.