3 weeks ago, it was snowing. 3 weeks ago, I took these photos. 3 weeks ago, it was cold, dark and grim ... and I nearly gave up.
The funny thing about winter in the mountains is that is gets under your skin, it goes on forever (well, that's how it feels) and no matter how many you've done; you forget - while you are in it - just what a colossal challenge it is!
On September 1st it was like someone had literally flipped a switch in the Macedon Ranges, all the trees that had blossomed at 6 weeks prior in town, finally burst forth their buds. Dots of yellow started to appear across the hills as the daffodils flowered, at last. A week before it had been snowing and sun was a distant memory and then ... BOOM.
So now that Winter is over, I can finally look back and say, it was a long, hard haul. I can see, with the perspective that hindsight offers, that it was a bit of a dark night of the soul. I was constantly being challenged on physical, emotional, spiritual and practical levels. I kept picking myself up , dusting myself off and plunging head first right back at the problem (s). I just couldn't seem to catch a break. But now I see it: sometimes there is a fine line between healthy determination and just throwing your head up against a brick wall! I remember reading once that "over-doing" is just fear in disguise and I think that's true. But while I was busily running into walls, I didn't realise that was what was happening. I thought I was being strong, resilient and healthily determined when actually I was pig-headedly trying to force things to happen because I am so very terrified that I might stuff this all up. Oh dear!
Well, we can laugh now and hopefully I have learnt something. At a particularly rough time, I came across this written up in a local cafe:
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up."
Thomas Edison
Of course, I took that to mean that I must keep trying to make things happen and off I went to connect my head to another brick wall but what you will hopefully get from it is that yes, sometimes you do just need a little extra determination to get where you want to but more often what you actually need is just a bit more faith.