Saturday, December 14th, 2013
There’s little I love like a new beginning. Oh, don’t get me wrong…one of the other few things I love as much is a good culmination. I love the time of leaves falling from the trees as much as their blossoms. I just know that even the saddest endings ultimately lead to new life, and new love. And that is what I am in love with…that there is never a winter without a spring to follow it.
I know you’ve probably heard this one from me before…I love to mention it. When I was a child and started my first diary, I used to write at the end of my entries sometimes, “And tomorrow I will be a whole new me.” I was so aware that whatever had happened in the day, I had a brand new chance the next. Every day was new year’s for me…and still is. Yet I relish even more the special times where we focus so fully and collectively on a new start, like the beginning of a new year.
It was one of “those days” yesterday. The days when everything crumbles and as it does, a brick hits you square in the head. And while you are still reeling, another few come down right after it in the same spot. It’s hard to get back up on those days. By the time evening came I was aching from it all, and the wintery night seemed less than inviting at that moment. My sweetheart wasn’t quite up to it, but I decided to slide into my jeans and out the door to a dance party we’d been invited to.
There was almost no one I knew there, but the dj was a friend of mine whose music I like a lot, and I found a warm corner of my own to dance in. It was by the back wall of the room which was lit with cascading strings of golden lights. I knew dancing would heal me, and when I nearly-closed my eyes the lights looked like a universe of stars, dancing just for me. So we danced together, me and the stars, and all my sore places melted into warm waters, and the ocean inside me was soothed, and still left wild.
A Michael Jackson song came on that used to make me dance across the living room when I was eight years old. My smile broadened widely as I remembered it, and felt that same feeling in my body. I thought, as I think so often, about the fact that if you can still get in touch with what made you want to dance across the living room when you were eight years old, you will always have a new beginning at hand. And if you can’t still get in touch with that, you can make it your whole, deep soul intention to do so. You can re-discover your original spark, and light a new flame in your heart and life. Maybe being eight years old wasn’t great for you, but it can be the second time around. It can be if you can reclaim and ignite your sense of childish delight, your sense of compelled wonder, your sense of true, unedited, naked desire. What did you once wish on a star for? And what, if completely free to do so as you chose, would you wish for now?
For those precious wishes are more a north star for you than the stars you wish upon could ever be. Those wishes are the golden lights strung along your heart, that make you want to dance.
And if you can’t make out the stars at all to wish upon, and wouldn’t know your own childish delight if you met it on a street corner, then start letting go of things that definitely do not make you feel that way…that group you hate going to meetings for, that “friend” that puts you down, that sweater that makes you feel frumpy rather than fabulous. While at first it may seem like you are just emptying out a lot of space with nothing to fill it with, that space will eventually start to feel grand, and ultimately it’s where your new spark will land and light a sweet blaze of new passion in your life.
It might call you out on a cold night, alone, and with the sore spots from bricks that landed on you, one after the other, and that might just bring you back to dancing along the carpet when you were eight years old, giggling and carefree. It might remind you that all the best of life is yet to come for you, and it begins right now…
With love and in the name of twinkling new star beginnings…
Love, Jennifer
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