Bud Break Expectancy
When I was a kid, living in Guatemala City, my dad had a darkroom set up in a little storage room at the back of the second-floor deck where we used to hang our clothes to dry. The room was always a little cool and had an acrid chemical smell that you could almost taste.
When my dad was working on developing a roll of film, the only light allowed was a dim red light. He would carefully open the back of the camera he had used and pull out the film that had been exposed during the photo shoot. He would develop the long, thin, translucent black roll in a small tank with some kind of chemical developer. Using precise timing, he would stop the process with water and pull out the film, hanging it to dry on wires he had strung across the table where he worked. This was the first look at what he had tried to capture with his camera. He would stand there, with his head cocked to one side and review what could be seen in the negative, with the light and dark reversed.
I always thought the negatives looked weird. Everything that should have been dark was light, and everything that should have been light was dark! Faces looked especially creepy. But Dad knew what to look for in those tiny squares. Eventually, he would pick one or two and put them into a tiny tray in a special machine with photographic paper face up on the bottom. The burst of light from the machine through the negative made an invisible print on the paper. Using special tongs, so as not to touch the paper, he would slide the paper into a tray with a liquid chemical.
As we stood there expectantly hunched over the tray, the image would magically appear on the paper. Dad would use tongs to lift it out of the bath and hang it with something like clothespins on the wire to let it drip dry over the tray. The red light would go off and the ceiling light would come on to inspect the final product.
Recently, I ran across some of the photos he took of me that he developed in that little space. I’ve been working on a massive photo project, pulling together decades of printed photos and memorabilia, trying to create a few scrapbooks that will tell the story of our family for future generations. Oh, my goodness! A phone with a cord??
This whole process got me thinking about bud break in the vineyard. As the ground gets warmer this time of year, the tiny, unremarkable buds will begin to swell and eventually burst open. They have been on a quiet journey for a year. Just like the film rolled up in its little case in the guts of a camera. It is in the opening of the bud, or the developing of the film, that you can finally see the miracle that has been happening in that tiny, dark space.
The integrity and health of the bud is dependent on the long journey it has endured over the past year. The tiny buds all across the vineyard hold the entire harvest for this year. So much hope and expectancy are packed into those tiny buds! Every single shoot, leaf, tendril, and grape cluster is being developed inside the bud. Once the buds break open, the vine begins its amazing journey towards fruitfulness, and new buds begin to form on the cane that will become next year’s harvest.
Just after Bud Break…
Here’s the thing… This year’s harvest is a reflection of last year’s weather, soil nutrients, pests, and so on. Some things are controllable, some things are not, but every year is a precursor to the next year.
Isn’t that how it is in life and leadership? The attitudes and actions we cultivate in private or behind closed doors will inevitably burst forth, for better or for worse.
What are you cultivating in private during this season of life? Perhaps if you are cultivating internal hope and stability, that will become evident in the next season when it is necessary and become good fruit for those around you.
“I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.”
Personally, I’m trying to engage the deepest, hidden parts of myself and lean into expectancy. This is different from expectations. In a world that is filled with noise and chaos, it’s easy to fall into despair, or try to control others with our expectations. Expectation and expectancy are both related to hope but have very different sensibilities. Expectation is the place where I go to control the outcome I hope for. When I cultivate this type of “hope,” those around me lose their voice, while I impose my will on them.
“When I cultivate expectancy, there is a joyful openness to what may happen. It invites others to hope together with me for a shared outcome. ”
As the buds begin to break out this year, I invite you to join me in delight and wonder at the miracle of what is possible to develop in tiny, seemingly hidden spaces. Maybe we’ll be surprised at how the fruit of hope is developed over time in our lives, in our communities, or in our companies as we attend to the long journey of the bud of expectancy.