In our garden, Chinese Red and pink lilies, pinkish hollyhocks, golden and red marigolds, bright yellow coreopsis and golden Stella d’ Oro are blooming in abundance. The beautiful red lilies were a planted as a gift by my brusque, colorblind brother to our mother to beautify her yard two decades ago. When each of them passed on at young ages as part of a wave of deaths and illnesses over nearly fifteen years ago, I transplanted them into our garden and learned a lesson about how my brother expressed love.

Peas and lettuces have also been abundant, but heavy rains have delayed planting later crops. As June continued, our lettuce harvest changed from thinning of young plants, to harvesting full heads, to leaving the best heads to bolt and set seed. I have begun succession planting of tomatoes and basil in rows where arugula and spinach have bolted and set seeds, completing their lives by maturing the seeds I will use for next year. I have also sown Hutterite and John Allen Cut Short heirloom beans in the rows where the summer’s heat is slowly withering our Thomas Laxton heirloom peas. I have also saved overripe peas, especially those with many peas in a pod, to use as seed next year.

The Solstice marks a transition in our area from delicate, perishable crops such as lettuces, asparagus and peas to hardier, more lasting crops like beets, carrots, onions, tomatoes and kale. Replacing crops in succession planting and gathering seed from dying plants, along with my own life, has caused me reflect on transitions in my life from a larger lens.

Before the Summer Solstice, I conducted my ten day annual life review, a practice I started each June in 2015, to consider how I can improve. Looking over past notes, I saw that many of the issues that have affected our lives have been out of our control, but by pondering these aspects of fate I clarified what I do have some ability to affect. Ironically, though I think of myself as having free will, many of the things within myself that I wish to change are tenacious and appear in my annual reviews each year as works in progress.

Fortunately, many of the changes outside my control has been for the better, but there was a nearly constant wave of deaths, injuries and crises for a year and a half in our web of life. To our good fortune, this devastating wave was followed by a series of births of babies among friends and family. Like the garden, our lives are moving in succession, with young spirits replacing we who are incarnate now. Only when lives are lost young, with great suffering, or unnecessarily is the hardship of death not part of the flow of the sacred river of life of the Earth.

During my life review this year, I could see the unfolding of the streams of life of our families—our grandparents, our parents, ourselves, and the younger people in our blended family—along with the communities where we are living out our lives. From this intergenerational view, I could see that many of the events, for good or ill, have been part of inevitable flow of our family and community cultures. A slow motion flowering of the consequences of our histories and our own actions.

The good times have contained seeds of trouble and eventual crises that were overlooked at the time, like weeds in a garden that go unnoticed until they choke out the plants we have sown. During the crises, we struggled, cried and felt bitter remorse. During these hard times, I argued more with my wife and suffered from a lack of faith as we struggled to keep to a course that would maintain a happy, healthy family.

During these crises, we learned. We made different choices, sometimes out of bleak necessity, and focused our minds on managing events one by one. The wave of deaths, illnesses and crises brought to light my own failings and demanded solutions. Whether my choices during this wave were the best for my family will only be known in time.

As the wave of births and new lives took hold, joy returned from the shadow of death and our lives are now filled with the near-constant caring for young children who all-too-soon will venture away from their homes and into a human world not of their creation. They will succeed us, passing farther down the stream of life than we do, gaining from what we do right now, suffering from our mistakes.

For the most part, I have reacted poorly to the challenges. Yet, there has been a succession of good fortune and the bliss of new lives. If anything, most of the benefits that we have received have not been of my doing alone; rather they have been what skeptically-minded people would call luck or random chance and what—often in a self-serving way—some religious people would call grace.

In the larger human world, the dramas of princes and principalities have played out, as much out of the control of sensitive and ordinary people like me as the winds of the sky. For decades, my mind has been focused on the small human world around me—my family, community, and workplace—and I have put forth a lot of effort in that small world. It is in that small, precious world of loved ones and others who we share daily life with that I see my failures and good works have the greatest effect. It is in that world—where I have the greatest impact—that my annual life review focuses on.

In the larger human world of international trials and tribulations, the princes and principalities continue on, perpetuating mistakes and vainglory attempts to succeed through the Covenant of Bad Works. Like my own failings, whatever benefit these leaders seek through power-over-others will pass from them through the seeds of their own actions. The lesson in my personal world is the same: the more that I work to improve myself, to love in action those I care for, act with respect and consideration towards those in my community, pull my own weight at work and in my family, and to seek a sustainable relationship with the Earth, the more we all will prosper. The challenge is not in the saying; the challenge is in the doing.

As for my resolutions?—I have already failed in seeking to live according to them. Fortunately, I have the rest of the year to steer my course toward a better future for me and the loved ones who will succeed me in the sacred flow of life on Earth.