Immersed in the annual paperwork, yard work and going-through-all-my-stuff rituals that mark my transition into the New Year
I am filled with such gratitude for all the simple blessedness in my life.
For countless days I’ve been getting covered in earth and scratches while tending to my annual winter garden clean up. Raking leaves, pulling weeds, pruning back my rose bushes, giving crewcuts to much of what else lives in my little gardens. Hauling and dragging the green and brown “waste” out into the farthest reaches of the orchard where it will compost back into the earth to feed new growth.
With a growing tenderness for my aging body, I go slowly. Doing smallish bits each day now rather than–as once was my way–working full out till it gets too dark or my teeth ache from holding a flashlight between them for too long! Working in smaller bits also helps me deal more gently with all the letting go I have to do. The sadness I feel as I trim back all the wild exuberance that’s been overflowing its beds or its containers all thro the year. Always this necessary cutting back brings a kind of melancholy until it’s done. Then, I fall in love anew with my more spare, more Zen gardens. This year without a frost to kill back the enormous tropical former-houseplant plant I call my beanstalk, things are not quite as Zen as usual!
Just as I finish preparing all my green friends for their brief California “winter” siesta, I find the first yellow jonquils blooming in the meditation garden. And, I notice the acacia tree has burst into bloom. This birthing in the middle of all the dying away moves me deeply and sweetly.
The end of the garden work nearly completes my annual cycle of preparing for renewal. Making room–making open space everywhere in my world for letting in the newness to come. I’ve gone through all my “stuff.” Refreshing my memory of what is stored where in my ship-like stowing spaces. Papers, possessions, clothes, cupboards, drawers. Touching, cleaning, winnowing, passing on or recycling all that’s no longer relevant or meaningful. Preparing new files for the year ahead, gathering old files for doing my taxes or for storing away. Updating the letter of instruction that goes with my will.
At the end of it all I feel an enormous sense of peace and completion. I feel incredibly “current” in my life as I wander through all my indoor and outdoor spaces reveling in the order and the openness. As outside me so inside me. In my deepest being, I’ve also been (although with less conscious awareness) reviewing: sorting, pruning, letting go, preparing for newness.
The very last hurrah of the year that’s ended comes as I actually put together all the figures for my “always the first week in February” tax appointment. As I sit here finishing this entry and working on a monthly musing for my web site, I am celebrating that very last bit of completion. As I write, I am actually beginning the move into this next, newest chapter of my life! And, standing at this threshold, I have absolutely no idea of what may lie ahead. I feel excited and curious.
The letter I sent along with my 2004 New Year’s card reflects my year ending/year beginning completing, reviewing, preparing process. So, too, does the collection of inspirational quotes that I sent along with the letter and the card. The quotes seem to speak to what feels most important to me at this moment in my life:
“Solstice 2003/New Year’s 2004
Dear Ones,
Despite proliferating craziness in the world at large, life in this little orange orchard has been relatively peaceful and gentle this year. Cycles of releasing, deepening and opening have been lushly interwoven with long and frequent stretches of luxurious, restful, replenishing quietude. I’m filled with such gratitude for the gentleness in my life.
There’ve been some sweet miracles for which I am also profoundly grateful: My very dear 87-year-old father is actually back to bowling twice a week after having broken his hip in March (and having been all but killed during the course of his treatment). A very sentimentally valuable ring that I lost on a long delayed, chaotic flight to my folks was–against all odds–actually turned into the lost and found at the Ft. Lauderdale airport. And, a siege of extremely persistent, challenging back and hip spasms opened me to some quite deep releasing of very old stored-in-my-body wounds.
It’s been a year in which I’ve been becoming more and more able to, in the words of Alice Walker, “Expect nothing/Live frugally on surprise.” Such richness, calm and simple joy come with being available to whatever Spirit/our deep self brings to us in each moment. With trusting that our beings know more than our minds do about what and when is right for us.
In the last days before the Solstice, I’ve had a really magical experience. My much beloved and trusty 18 year old Toyota Tercel Wagon has been, for the past few years, gradually succumbing to the wear and tear of her 196,500 miles. Loyally attached to her and totally daunted by the prospective challenges (and expense) involved in choosing and buying a new car, I kept on repairing all the little and big things that were falling apart. I collected articles and information about car buying and about specific cars that seemed like possibilities. But always that’s as far as I seemed able to go. I let myself be about it all, even as my repair people nudged me about it being time to move on.
Then one day, the “moment of shift” finally and unexpectedly arrived. With surprisingly little hassle or confusion, I found, negotiated a deal for and bought a car. Though I would ordinarily have chosen a “stripped down” model, circumstances and availability brought me to a car with more comforts. Oddly enough that felt totally fine with this me. I just love the little Plum colored PT Cruiser that’s coming into my life! And, I’m allowing myself to do one last round of “fixing” for my old dependable little red wagon before I let her go on to someone new.
Always I am so profoundly affirmed and rewarded for trusting my deep self. For trusting this intuitive, knowing self that, if not interfered with, seems inevitably to lead me to just where I need to be just when I need to be there. Over and over I learn to not allow my own or anyone else’s thoughts-about-the-matter to override that knowing. To not let my own or anyone else’s ideas of where I “ought-to-be-by-now” diminish my valuing of just where I am. To not be impatient with the rhythm of my process. To trust that there is a rhythm to my process even if I can’t yet see it. To trust that there is a process in motion even in the absence of much evidence on the manifest level.
In a world that’s ever more focused on and addicted to bottom lines and quick fixes, all this seems even more essential than ever!
I send love, a bounty of blessings and a heartful of hope for us all and for our beleaguered planet as the light begins to return this Solstice. May we each be given the strength to know what our deepest truth is and the strength to act from the very center of that knowing in all we do,”
SOME INSPIRATIONS FOR THE YEAR AHEAD
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never directly knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but
We take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille
Don’t be satisfied with poems
And stories of how things
Have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth,
Without complicated explanation,
So everyone will understand
The passage.
Rumi
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You have only to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
Help us to be always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth.
May Sarton
That hurt we embrace becomes joy.
Rumi
the faith and the love
and the hope are all
in the waiting...
So the darkness
shall be the light
and the stillness the dancing.
T.S. Eliot
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart.
Try to allow the questions themselves,
like locked rooms,
and like books that are written in a very foreign language.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing,
live along some distant day into the answer.
Rilke
Being nobody but yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings
Originally published January 2004
