When I was a child, I was a little nuts about not getting my hands dirty or sticky. If I ate a lollipop and my hands got the slightest bit sticky, I wanted to immediately wash my hands. I didn’t mind playing in the dirt, but as soon as I was finished, I washed my hands. I’m still that way.
I bought mums for my front porch about a week ago, and they’ve been sitting in my garage ever since. My husband finally took them outside and watered them in order to keep them alive. The flowers in my planters have been dead for a few weeks. I had no good reason for not switching out the flowers except that I didn’t want to make the effort to do so. I didn’t want to get my hands dirty.
I finally took the mums around to the front porch, and set them on the steps. I dug my bare hands down into the soil of the dead flowers in the planters, and removed them at their roots. I tossed them to the side, and dug big enough holes in the soil in which to place the mums. When I positioned the mums in the holes, I gathered the soil around them. Instantly, the new replaced the old. My hands were proof of the transformation: they were dirty.
Anything worth having requires work, especially when it means replacing the old with the new. It means getting our hands dirty.
I’ve found this to be especially true in relationships and dreams. When a relationship or a dream is near death, we have to dig in with both hands, and do the dirty, hard work of transformation…of renewal. To keep our hands clean means to keep our hands off, to ignore the death. If we’re going to experience something new, the old has to be dug up by the root and tossed aside. And when the new is in place, we still have to do the work of gathering life-giving sustenance around it. We can only wash our hands when the new is firmly in place. Even then, we’ll still get our hands dirty from time to time, especially when new seasons come along.
As much I like for my hands to be clean, I don’t want clean hands. I don’t want to sit idly by and turn a blind eye to what’s dead or dying. I want to get my hands dirty. I want to make room for the new.
