Chapter 217 Eleanor's at Eighty-Six
Chapter 217 Eleanor's at Eighty-Six
Chapter Two Hundred and Seventeen
Eleanor at Eighty-Six
Eleanor called in December of the ninth year from the Vermont garden where she was doing the winter work of the forty-first year with the quality of someone who had been doing the winter work for forty-one years and understood what it was and was giving it what it required without any hesitation or reservation.
She was eighty-six years old. Lily had been thinking about Eleanor's age since the fortieth spring — thinking about it the way you thought about the age of something that had been in serious and sustained relationship with the gift for sixty years and had arrived, through that relationship, at a quality of being that no other person in the network could have arrived at through any other path. The sixty-year relationship with the gift had produced in Eleanor the specific quality of someone who had been in close proximity to the most extraordinary thing in the world for sixty years and had been changed by the proximity in the way that sixty years of proximity to extraordinary things always changed the people who sustained it.
"The forty-first winter," Eleanor said when she called. "The first winter after the dissolution's completion. I want to tell you what the forty-first winter is."
"Tell me," Lily said.
"The forty-first winter is not a winter in the seasonal sense," Eleanor said. "The forty winters before it were winters in the seasonal sense — the specific quality of the gift's winter, the preservation phase, the root work, the dormancy of the surface with the deep work continuing below. The forty-first winter is different. The dissolution completed in June. The source and the spring are the same quality. The seasonal cycle has not stopped but the forty-first winter is not the same winter that the first forty winters were." She paused. "The forty-first winter is the medium quality's winter. The forward motion's winter. Not the gift's winter of preservation and rest. The forward motion's winter of — I keep reaching for a word and the word I keep finding is preparation. The forward motion's winter of preparation."
"Preparation for what?" Lily asked.
"For the forty-second spring," Eleanor said. "Which will not be the fortieth spring more advanced. It will be the first spring after the forward motion's winter of preparation. A spring that has been prepared for by the forward motion rather than by the seasonal cycle." She was quiet for a moment. "I do not know what the forty-second spring will be. I have never been here before. I have never been in the winter after the dissolution's completion before. I am reading what I can read and describing what I can describe and the rest I will know when the forty-second spring arrives."
Lily sat with this. She thought about the Norwegian forest's forward motion carrying Eleanor's dissolution quality since July. She thought about the eight thousand years of directional transmission that had been moving toward the world's own most natural expression. She thought about what the first spring after the forward motion's winter of preparation would produce in a garden that had arrived at the dissolution's completion and had given its quality to the medium space and was now in the medium space's forward motion.
"Eleanor," she said. "The forty-second spring. I want to be there."
"Yes," Eleanor said. "Come in April. The forty-second spring will arrive in April. I feel the preparation building toward April." She paused. "Bring Ethan. Bring Ama. Bring Sarah. Bring whoever you think needs to be there when the forty-second spring arrives."
"Who else?" Lily asked.
"The network will know," Eleanor said. "The members who are ready to receive the forty-second spring's quality will feel it through the connection when it arrives. Not all three hundred and sixty-one of them — the ones who are at the right stage of their own development to receive what the forty-second spring produces. The chain will identify them through the connection the way the chain always identifies the right people for the right thing."
"April," Lily said.
"April," Eleanor confirmed. "The forward motion's first spring."
The December call ended with the Vermont winter doing its forty-first winter work in the Vermont garden and Eleanor in the garden in the pre-dawn darkness tending the forward motion's preparation with the quality she brought to everything — fully present, unreserved, exactly herself.
Lily pressed her palms to the Boston December soil after the call and felt the source quality and the advancing dissolution and the forward motion beginning to arrive and she thought: April. The forty-second spring. The first spring after the forward motion's winter of preparation.
She thought: I do not know what it will be.
She thought: that is exactly right. The right size is always ahead of what you can see from where you are standing. The forty-second spring is beyond what I can see from December of the ninth year. I will be there in April. I will see it when it arrives.
She thought: the chain always shows you what you need to see when
the time is right.
She thought: April.