The Breath Before Becoming

I was away for only a week. Well, just over a week. 

Just ten days—and in that short span, the world here changed. The forest didn’t ask for my permission. The berry bushes didn’t pause their schedule for my return. Time, it seems, had gone on tending to things in my absence, as it always does.

When I stepped back onto the familiar trail, the air felt the same—maybe a touch warmer, the light a bit more golden—but the changes revealed themselves quickly. Along the edges of the path, the berry bushes were heavy with gifts. Tiny pink huckleberries clung to slender stems, their skins flushed like shy cheeks. The salmonberries had gone bold—some the color of sunrise, others as red as dusk. I gathered a few between my fingers and ate them slowly, letting the soft tartness remind me: the season had turned a page.

Wally, ever the diligent forest detective, wasn’t interested in berries. His nose was busy reading the newsprint of the trail, deciphering the paw prints and scents left behind by raccoons and deer and other small wanderers. While he zigzagged ahead with squirrel patrol purpose, I lingered behind, struck by the quiet miracle unfolding before me.

Because just a few weeks ago, these same bushes were bare. They looked like skeletons then—thin branches, thorny outlines, a suggestion of life more than life itself. In winter, they are even more stark, their spindly arms reaching skyward like antennae listening for the return of the sun. I’ve walked past them in January and thought, “How could anything come back from this?”

But of course, they do. They always do.

And that’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about now: how life keeps rising up from the places that seemed so lifeless. How, underneath stillness, something is always preparing to bloom. It’s not just a seasonal rhythm—it’s a truth that echoes across every form of existence.

There is a kind of resurrection happening all the time.

We often reserve that word—resurrection—for holy texts or dramatic rebirths. But maybe it’s quieter than that. Maybe it happens in berry bushes. Maybe it’s there in the way a branch that once looked brittle and gray suddenly offers up something sweet. Maybe it’s present every time a person who’s been through something hard—grief, failure, illness, despair—starts to feel the faint stirrings of hope again.

The thing about resurrection is, it rarely looks like fireworks. It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes, it’s simply a berry ripening in the shade.

What nourishes that growth? Time, yes. But also faith. quiet and invisible. It doesn’t demand evidence, but still carries on watering, still believes something is happening beneath the surface.

We live in a world that prizes urgency, progress, and instant visibility. But the huckleberries remind me: real growth takes time. And it doesn’t always show itself until it’s ready. The branches didn’t need my attention to bear fruit. They didn’t post updates. They simply followed the rhythm written into their cells.

That’s the rhythm I want to trust more in my own life—the slow, unseen pulse of change. I want to believe that even when I feel like the bare branches of winter, something in me is being readied for bloom.

Because stillness is not the end. It is the breath before becoming. The hush before return. The place where life gathers strength before its next blooming.

And I want to remember that resurrection isn’t a one-time event. It happens over and over. In forests. In hearts. In forgotten gardens. In dreams once shelved.

Maybe you’ve been through a winter of your own. Maybe something in you feels skeletal or spent. I hope you’ll remember what the berry bushes know: time, patience, and nature’s quiet alchemy are enough. Life is stubborn. It finds a way.

This afternoon, I reached just beyond the edge of sturdy balance, stretching deep into the tangle of a salmonberry shrub. There, glowing like a beacon in the filtered light, hung a single golden berry. I twisted it gently from its stem, and it fell into my hand like a promise. Not a loud one, but the kind that hums underneath everything: You are still growing. Even now. Even here.

And as Wally bounded ahead, tail wagging and nose low to the grassy ground, I followed, snacking on fruit that hadn’t been there before, stepping into the next quiet chapter of the season, grateful for what keeps rising, even when it seems impossible.