Saturday, September 24th, 2005

I recently leaned over the bed of a woman who was passing from this world, and she was beautiful. She looked nothing like the recent picture taken of her on the bedroom table. Her white hair streamed across the pillow and her long fingers looked like willow branches at rest in space. Just as she looked unlike her picture in this transitory period, her transition was unlike what anyone thought it was. She was being reborn.

We are sometimes unrecognizable when being reborn as well. It is because to be reborn is to change everything within us that is changeable, to bring us closer to the unchangable within. This equinox has been like an absolute remodel, remake, renovation. For some of us it is something we ordered, prayed for, requested. For others it is out of left field entirely. Nonetheless it is here and it is flooding us, some of us literally. It can be disorienting to say the least. It can also bring a state of desperation so total that surrender is absolutely all there is left to try.

Surrender means you may not get what you are asking for, but it also means you are in a state of trust, whether compelled to be or not, and that indeed you may get something better than what you had hoped. Very few of us, if any, are constantly in a state of such perspective that we truly know that what we think we want would make us happy. Thank goddess that somebody does.

Know that the pain of this transformation will abate and new life will be sweet. Know that a re-designing of your life and who you think you are can be the thing you have most prayed for, that lifts the obstacles of the old plan and makes everything flow smoothly. Relax your grasp on life and let it grasp you.

Sunday, August 28th 2005

Finally rain fell today. Like a welcome opening of the sky, like a good cry. Things are quieting and coming into focus in a new way. Vision is clearing and the hot blur is fading into the settle of orange leaves and curls of madrona bark on the street.

A couple of days ago I just lay in a field and watched it all fall. Seeds, feathers, whisps of dry leaves, petals, stems. It felt like a different kind of rainfall, like heaven was dropping little bits of nature everywhere. This is how miracles descend into our lives. We often just need to lay down long enough and breathe, so that we can feel them. Or even choose them.

I am not afraid of harvest…though the idea of it catches in my chest sometimes. The immensity of life’s constant offering of beauty, even layered over the most painful times. The intensity of the pleasure of watching the things you have dreamed of unfold, or of the yearning for them that brings them life.

We are meant to be met with such grace, at every turn. The challenge is finding it and holding our focus there…even if it is a tiny diamond in a vast street of waste. We are meant to be able to lay back into a field and lose ourselves entirely in the smell of the earth and the touch of the sky.

When it has been a long time we decide not to visit anymore, but nature always waits for us…to give us our purest reflection, and to hold us. This autumn ask yourself where it is safe to fall, and what you hope will fall from the sky with that surrender.