Saturday, May 8th, 2010

I know.  I know what it’s like when some days drag you down like an undercurrent that takes your breath away.  I know what it is like to live in a time when simply being in the endless waves of shifting energy is like finding your mind in a vacuum one moment, your heart the next, and your body swirling along with all of it, often painfully and only rarely playfully trying to adapt to new frequencies.  I know what it is like to be among those who chose to experience these changes before everyone else.  To be among the ones who inform the movement simply by allowing the transformation to occur within us first.  We heal the pain of many lifetimes in this one.  It aches like a long-broken heart.

But there is summer…

It’s funny how I really do know, of course, that year after year summer will come.  But when spring truly takes hold and I get the first taste of summer on the breeze, I realize there is a part of me that had stopped believing, at some point in the long winter, that it would actually come.  So when I really begin to feel in my chest and my bones that it will, it is like a revelation.  Like something I once knew from an ancient past but hadn’t believed could come again.  This is a feeling we may all get to know well in the coming years, as a collective summer gets ready to return.

For as we all know, summer itself as a season is also simply the most beautiful, resplendent representation of something we carry within ourselves.  It is heat, it is light, it is fire.  It is fertile, it is rich, it is fruitful and thriving.  It is rapturous and contagious and moon glow and warm nights.  It is your muscles letting go and your body opening and your heart releasing.  It is dancing and laughter and forgetting everything that hurts.  It is falling in love…with everything.

We have been hardening in so many ways for so very long.  We have hardened ourselves against work and survival and pain.  We have molded and stretched and crunched ourselves in around time and other boxes and labels and drawers.  We have shelved ourselves.  We have grown used to darkness and cold and foods that don’t nourish us.  We have numbed ourselves to so many forms of trauma and abuse…and to something that seems like not as big a deal but which the insidiousness of feels as if it erodes our very soul…and that is going against who we really are.  It happens in a billion tiny ways, year after year, until we break…and then break open.

It is time, my friends.  Oh great Oracles of the world…it is time to break free and find out who you are underneath all you have been obligated to, conditioned by, and pressured under.  It is time to find your little piece of summer…of everlasting summer…and let it get bigger, and then so much bigger.  It is time to take the risks that allow you to surrender in the places you know you want to let go, and are just afraid that what comes next will be harsh instead of soft.  It is time to take that chance.  It is time to let some people not like you and not to give a damn.  It is time to walk freely on your own path, letting everything else around you settle and fall as it may.  Time to take a chance on believing in yourself more than you ever have before…  Time to drop a few layers away and feel the freshness of the wind against your body.  Time to forget who you have been told to be, and who you have told yourself to be…and just be.

You just might fall in love…with summer…with the summer in your heart…with yourself.  And all loves will follow.  Get dirty, get crazy, get wild…or get quiet, close the doors, and hide from the world.  It is all about you.  Making it all about you is how you will open the secret door to the new land.  It is how you will break through.  Then it can be about anything and everything else you want it to.  Seize the moment…grab the chance…risk getting it wrong because that is the only way you will find what is right.

It is a sunny day and when I am done writing I am going to go out to the trees and the garden and the horizon and the clouds and get lost.  Wildly, beautifully, lost.  I am going to give myself to everything I see, and lose nothing.  Summer is coming…and she will disrobe us…and we will never get over our gratitude.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

And I don’t care, if they eat me alive,

I’ve got better things to do than survive.

–Ani Difranco

I’ve been brewing lately…stewing, steeping.  I’m incubating something and I am not even pressuring it with questions.  It’s mysteriousness is sacred.  It will become something beyond anything I have dreamed, if I but let it.  I don’t need to know what it is yet…I just need patience.

I love spring.  It is like a promise kept…like a hope redeemed.  As life bursts forth from everything, triumphant and irrepressible, it is the perfect metaphor for the renewal that is available to us at all times.  We get to see the lushness we carry within once again represented outside of ourselves.  It is there so we will remember…so we will remember that we always carry spring inside.  For when we have the power of renewal always at our fingertips…we are free.

We aren’t weighed down by yesterday and all the days before it.  We aren’t burdened by what has happened in this life or the ones that preceded it.  We are only blessed by whatever was a gift in it all, and everything else rings untrue, and falls from our lips before we could speak it…from our hands before we could hold it.  We trust in the moment, and we trust in our blossoming.  We know it can never be missed, and that we deserve the fullness of its absolute glory.  In the meantime we have faith in the growth that will take us there, painful as it may sometimes be.

And how again do we do this exactly?  We remember how to be new.  How to let ourselves feel new.  How to start over.  For we can always begin again…in fact we always are beginning again in each new moment, and knowing this is what gives us wings.  Once we are free of all we have been, we can begin to consider who we are, and who we want to be.  We are not afraid anymore of what that might mean and what change it might bring.  We welcome it like walking out into a wild storm to get wet and windblown because nothing would feel better.  We call the lightning.

We begin to think we may be much more than what others have thought us to be, or told us we were.  We realize we may be much more than we ever even considered ourselves to be.  We stop worrying about what we fear we might lose, and begin to understand all we will gain.  We discover we have been trapped in too small a box and wonder how we ever stood it, and it splinters to bits as we outgrow it.  We start to outgrow many things.  We leave things behind…and it feels good.  Deeply, soulfully good.  You fly higher than the other birds and at first you can hear their angry mocking but very quickly it falls away as you rise.  You fly alone for while and then you meet others, in that new place of soaring.

It is time to let go of some things you have outgrown and take some chances, the ones, only and always, that your heart calls you to take, on something new.  It is time for some outrageous and deeply needed change and you are ready for it…whether you know it or not.  Your soul has been singing back and forth with it for a long time now.  Just take the same chance the flowers take to bloom again, and you will realize you know how to do it as easily as they do.  And until the moment comes that is just right, remember patience, and hope…and that spring is always within you.

Love, Jennifer