The sun is rising eastwards again and setting further into the west.

It’s April on the island, and I’m finding that I like the gentle shifts that signal Kauai in the spring. Flowers that slumbered throughout the winter months are opening up. The gray hues of the ocean that marked the passage of the new year are giving way to brighter turquoise and aquamarines.

And I’ve been reflecting on the passage of time and how the seasons mark our own times and seasons in life.

I don’t often write personal reflections on this blog anymore, mostly it’s just poetry, and I save my longer words for my website. But I’m working on a new book, which has me combing through the kinds of posts I was sharing on sunshine in winter this time last year, and I thought I’d slip back into that writing style for nostalgia’s sake.

Integration is an interesting process. One you need to experience and live before you can fully write or talk about. I’ve been working on the sequel to Lamentations of the Sea– Transformations of the Sun– which is all about who I became after the loss of my brother and what it’s been like to take a leap of faith, leaving life in Alaska to start over again on an island.

Piecing together the manuscript has helped me piece myself together in deeper ways. It’s like every day we are given experiences that provide us with a new puzzle piece to the bigger picture of who we are. Sometimes we need space and time so we can more fully assemble the pieces and understand what we are looking at.

Last year I was disassembling all the old pieces of my Alaskan life, this year I am slowly putting new pieces together of who I’m becoming in Kauai. I still can’t see the full picture, but one thing is for certain: there is an incredible difference between contemplating a change and actually living a change.

I’ve had to learn to live a deeper life of trust over here. Trusting the process. Trusting life to make a way. Trusting I’ll be supported in this faith leap.

Trusting there is a season for everything. It occurs to me that the lavender sunrise, the thousands of song birds, and the gentle pink bromeliads, which greeted me on my morning walk are not worrying about tomorrow, and they are definitely not worrying about how things will look this summer.

Instead, they are just doing their thing- shining and singing and blooming- right now.

We can learn a lot from nature when we stop and pay attention, and I am reminded that my questions of- What happens next? What am I doing over here?– have already been answered by nature’s wisdom.

Do not worry about tomorrow- just shine and sing and bloom right now, and keep trusting life to make a way when it is time for a new season.

The jungle outside my window is brilliant in her emerald visage; she sounds like she’s speaking extra loud and joyful this morning. I have a clean slate of a day with nothing to do but write, create, and work on my projects. Trusting all will unfold as it should; putting together the pieces of me under the jungle’s laughing gaze.