Beyond The Asphalt: The Soul Remembers - Episode 24

A broken-down RV, tiny wildflowers pushing through cracks in the road, crystal-clear lakes, and the healing wisdom of wilderness all weave together in this tender reflection on resilience, softness, and what happens when life threatens to harden the human heart. Sometimes the soul simply needs to remember how to bloom again.

Transcript

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Welcome, my friends, to Light in the Garden, a soft place to land, to breathe, and to remember who you truly are. I'm Lulu, and this podcast is my offering. Here we explore the quiet places where the human and the divine meet, through stories from the road, the lake, where I spend many hours, and the long path of my own becoming. Each episode is simply a companion for your heart. Thank you for joining me today. I'm so very glad you're here. This episode is called Beyond the Aspalt. Several years ago, I traveled through Colorado in an RV with two of my kiddos. It was supposed to be a grand adventure into the great unknown. Anything west of Florida felt like unexplored territory to us. The RV, purchased used from a dealership, was supposed to be in excellent condition. That turned out to be the real fairy tale, not the trip, but the RV. Nearly everything on that vehicle broke down before we finally limped our way home two months later. I can't even remember the exact order of the disasters anymore, but here is the best of my accounting of them. We had two flat tires in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Not at the same time, thankfully, but still two flat tires. The refrigerator died, the water pump failed, the hydraulic stairs broke and had to be held in place with bungee cords. Somewhere in Utah, the awning flew completely off the side of the RV. Maybe it's still laying out there somewhere. Coming down a mountain out of Rocky Mountain National Park, we lost our brakes. At one point, the tray holding the generator lost its screws on one side. I kept hearing this terrible scraping sound and finally realized the tray was dragging along the highway underneath us. Thank goodness we didn't lose that generator. When we reached a campground, I crawled beneath the RV, pushed the generator tray upward with my knees and held it with my feet, and tied it to the chassis using clothesline. My youngest son kindly brought me a pillow from inside the RV for the back of my head while I worked. That still touches my heart. Toward the end of the trip, a mechanic in Mississippi finally discovered that there was a kink in the fuel line, something none of the previous repair shops had caught. That tiny kink caused the engine to stall at the worst possible moments, particularly while crawling up mountains with no shoulder on the side of the road. Cars would maneuver around us while I stood outside waving traffic on like a construction worker, but without that orange vest. Occasionally someone would roll down their window and ask if we were alright. I became very good at smiling and shrugging my shoulders. I learned humility on that trip. But strangely enough, my children were still having fun. We were moving slowly for sure, but we were together and that was enough. And then one day while creeping along an almost impossibly slow pace through the mountains, I looked out the window and noticed tiny flowering weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. Funny what finally breaks through to us when life slows us down against our will. Something about those tiny flowers affected me deeply. Here they were growing out of a hardened pavement in a place buried beneath snow and ice for half the year, surviving traffic and harsh conditions and stubbornly reaching toward the sky, toward the sun anyway. Life may be fragile, but it is also astonishingly resilient and ferociously determined. Near my own town where I live is a beautiful lake community surrounding Lake Butler. The roads there are still dirt and gravel. Residents have intentionally refused to pave them because they do not want water or they do not want petroleum runoff leaching into the crystal clear water. I love that. Sometimes I wonder what life felt like a hundred years ago before asphalt covered so much of the earth, before parking lots replaced fields, before life became so rushed over and paved over. Remember when people sat on front porches and visited with neighbors? Now even our porches are screened in, protecting us not only from insects but often from one another. Sometimes I wonder. I think modern life itself feels pi paved over. I do love kayaking on Lake Butler, that little that actually it's a large lake in that little town near me because the water is so clear you can see all the way to the bottom. Fish glide beneath you, turtles drift silently by. Everything feels slower there. More honest somehow. I have slipped out of my kayak more than once just to float quietly in the water and feel myself become a part of it all. The sunlight seems softer there, the birds less afraid. It feels sacred. And maybe that's why that lonely little flower growing through asphalt in Colorado affected me so much. It reminded me that Mother Earth does not surrender. Grass returns, flowers bloom again, trees crack sidewalks apart, and water reshapes stone. Life keeps returning. I try to walk regularly in state parks and nature preserves. Of course, I travel there on asphalt roads and park in asphalt parking lots, and I rarely think about that until now. But the moment I step off of the hardened path and into the woods, I immediately take a deeper breath. In fact, I just took one while writing this. The woods call to me. The woods never ask me to perform or explain myself. They simply allow me to belong. I need that sense of belonging because sometimes the world, the noise, the opinions, the endless emotional static feels too harsh for my nervous system. And the silence of the woods, though honestly, it's never completely silent, because woodland creatures always seem to have plenty to say. Even so, it feels rich and nourishing to my soul. Nothing there is neat or manicured. Everything grows in tangled freedom. There are no straight lines. Fallen trees feed new life. Decay nourishes growth. Wilderness persists. Even when humanity attempts to dominate or destroy nature, it eventually rises again. Life insists upon itself. Lately, there's been a painful chasm forming within my own family structure. And at times I can feel the temptation toward emotional hardening. What happens when disappointment, grief, betrayal, exhaustion, or heartbreak begin paving over the softer places within us? It rarely happens all at once. A hurt here, a disappointment there, a betrayal we never fully recover from. Layer by layer, the heart begins covering itself over for protection. And yet, I do not believe hardening is the same thing as healing, of course. If we continually prave pave over our tenderness, eventually all our relationships suffer. Our marriages, our families, our our friendships, our communities. We just become less accessible to one another, less reachable, less alive. So I keep asking myself, what parts of me am I willing to pave over simply to survive? And honestly, I do not want survival alone. I want softness too. I want tenderness that still blooms even in the presence of bitterness, gentleness beyond self-protection, a heart that remains open despite disappointment. Today, after delivering meals on wheels, I stepped out of my car and found a bright red cardinal peer perched nearby at eye level, just a few feet away, singing as though he'd been waiting for me. The moment felt breathtaking. I hurried inside, without appearing to hurry, to refill the bird feeder. That moment changed my entire day. And perhaps that is the work now, to gently crack open the hardened places within ourselves, and water the tiny flowers of gratitude, forgiveness, wonder, and hope waiting beneath the surface. I am learning to look beyond the asphalt, to look for the greater good in myself and in others, to trust wilderness more than hardness. In my mind's eye, I see that tiny flowering weed pushing its way through the pavement in Colorado. That image alone feels like encouragement. Because you and I are not so different from that little flower. We keep reaching upward through the hardened places of life toward light, toward warmth, toward grace. So let us lift our faces to the sun and bloom anyway, regardless of the asphalt around us. I'd like to offer a longer breathing space now, an invitation to let this teaching land in your body, not just your mind. I call it coming back to softness. So if you're in a safe space, in a safe location, and you're able to close your eyes for a moment, allow yourself to arrive here fully. Not where you were going this morning, not where you may need to go later, just here. And take a long slow breath in and let it out gently. Breathe in and let it out softly. And one more time, let's breathe in. And exhale softly. There is something within you that is tired of rushing, tired of noise, tired of performing, tired of holding everything together so tightly. And perhaps today you do not need to hold yourself together quite so fiercely. Perhaps you can simply soften. Imagine yourself walking quietly into a forest with no agenda, no destination, no pressure to become wiser, calmer, more healed or enlightened. You are simply entering the woods exactly as you are. Notice the light filtering through the trees. Notice how nothing in the forest hurries. The trees are not striving. The birds are not comparing themselves to one another. The water does not apologize for flowing around stones instead of through them. Everything belongs by simply being what it is. And so do you. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Solid, ancient, steady. This earth has witnessed storms beyond your imagining. Wildfires and floods, loss and long winters, and still the forest returns. Life keeps returning. Allow yourself to breathe that in for a moment. There may be places within you that feel weary right now. Places hardened by disappointment. Places bruised by grief. Places exhausted from carrying too much for too long. You do not need to force those places open today. Simply notice them with tenderness. Like you might notice a wounded animal resting beneath trees. No judgment, no fixing, only compassion. And now, imagine somewhere deep within you there is a small clearing. A quiet inner meadow untouched by fear. Perhaps you have forgotten it was there, but it has never left you. In this clearing, the sunlight reaches all the way to the ground. The air is gentle here, and in the center of this sacred inner place, something small is growing. Maybe it's hope, maybe it's forgiveness, maybe courage, maybe the willingness to trust life again. You do not need to force it to bloom. You only need to stop trampling it with fear. So breathe softly. And as you breathe, imagine this tiny living thing receiving exactly what it needs: warmth, light, water, space. Feel your shoulders relaxing. Feel your jaw unclenching. Feel your nervous system remembering that gentleness is safe. The world may feel loud and sharp and demanding, but beneath all of that noise, life is still quietly creating beauty. Birds still sing before dawn. Trees still sway in the wind. Tiny wildflowers still bloom unnoticed along forgotten paths. And your soul still knows how to reach toward the light. You are not failing because you grow slowly. Nature grows slowly too. You are not weak because you feel deeply. Tenderness is not weakness, it is open to life itself. So take another deep breath. And imagine the breath moving through every hidden corner of your body, loosening what has become tight, softening what has become rigid, bringing warmth to the places within you that have felt cold or forgotten. There is nothing you must prove here, nothing you must earn. You already belong to this living world. You belong to the earth, to the wind, to the sunlight, to the great unfolding mystery of life itself. And perhaps healing begins not when we finally become perfect, but when we remember we were never separate from love to begin with. Rest there for just a moment, breathing in and breathing out. And when you're ready, gently bring your awareness back to the room, back to your body, back to this moment, carrying with you the quiet wisdom of the woods and the gentle reminder that life is still growing within you, even now. Remember, my dear friends, even in the ordinary moments of your day, there is always light waiting in the garden. So until next time, take good care of yourselves and of each other. And I thank you from the depths of my heart for visiting me today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with your friends. And I offer a deep bow to each of you. And finally, if you have found value here and would like to spend some one on one time with me, I offer spiritual companionship. Sometimes it really helps to have a steady presence beside you as you listen for your own inner wisdom and find your way forward.