Year-end/year-beginning order-making, letting go of ideas of how things "should be" so that I can follow where the energy leads me.
The way the Christmas holiday fell this year opened the space for me to have another eight days of retreat. This just a month after my ten-day birthday retreat! Such an enormous bounty of deep solitude. The amazing gift: such quiet in the midst of what always feels to me to be the most frenetic, energetically chaotic season of the year in the outside world. It’s a time I never participate in anyway.
This was a less “away” retreat than my November time out. I was out in the “real” world (such as it is in little Ojai) a few times–mostly to the copy shop–as I worked on various projects. And, since two of my very dearest friends were in the middle of very intense experiences, I was available for a couple of long phone calls with them. Nevertheless, the sense of being away from ordinary world/people/friend connections was strong. The stillness was profoundly nourishing and comforting.
In the silence I began my annual solstice, year-end rituals. So, the half yearly emptying and cleaning of my hot tub. Quite magically, the morning after I drained the tub turned out to be the first really warm day in weeks. That meant I could climb into it to bale out the last of the water and wipe down the walls with out getting thoroughly chilled. There’s something wonderfully childlike and silly about sloshing around in the bottom of the tub and getting soaking wet! My little one loves it.
Then, it was on to going through my files and desk drawers to make space for the New Year. It’s such fun going through all the little stashes of I-might-have-a-use-for-this “stuff” that get gathered throughout my year. It’s always a surprise to discover what I’ve felt the need to squirrel away there. And, I love being able to finally decide to pitch things out, to make open space.
As I removed the last year’s records and files, I got into preparing my 2001 tax box. Oddly enough, I always really enjoy gathering the last year’s records. It’s very satisfying to the part of me who loves order to be using my favorite colored pens to label envelopes for the categories of receipts for the tax box and then to label the new envelopes for my file drawer. I delight in meticulously laying out my yellow master sheets for recording the financial summaries I’ll do later on in the month.
After that, I got into writing (for the first time, ever) a Solstice letter to go with my New Year’s cards. The cards have been back from the printer, their envelopes stamped, addressed, and decorated for weeks. I’m still waiting for the right moment to arrive for me to begin writing in my personal messages. Once the card “arrives” from Spirit, it’s always fascinating to watch how I go about getting to the time when I actually launch it out into the world. It’s really okay with me to send it whenever it gets sent and usually it does get out by February! When it’s taking a longer rather than a shorter while for me to get to sending it out, I do “cheat” and read or show it to many of my friends and clients who are always curious and eagerly awaiting the new “installment.”
The annual preparing, pasting up and mastering a new hard copy catalog revised to include this year’s addition came next. This year, the revision included finally bringing the printed catalog into closer agreement with the online order form. The project was filled with the long-delayed move into using (and thoroughly delighting in the magic of having) my own personal handwriting font! For over two years, despite having the font available, I’d continued to hand print everything on graph paper and to then reduce it down to the size I needed for the catalog pages. I can’t believe how incredibly gorgeous the catalog looks now with all the text descriptions in my font. I keep rereading and rereading it!
It takes me a while, each step of the journey, to let go of old, familiar and comfortable ways. Even when the “new” way has enormous promise of being easier and freer and filled with greater flexibility and possibility. I always do take the next steps, but only when all of me feels safe and courageous and ready. Sometimes, that takes longer than other times. I’ve learned to trust my own slow process. A moment always arrives when the shift comes easily, like a fruit that falls from the tree when it’s fully ripened. I’ve learned that if there’s tugging and pulling involved, it’s always because it’s not yet time or I’m not yet “ripe” for whatever it is!
When I was telling my friend Kathleen about what I had been having such a good time with on my retreat, she had a good laugh. Only you, she said, would take such delight in doing what people ordinarily see as irritating, niggling or tedious “chores.” Her comment brought me to reflecting on how it is for me in my life these days.
I can remember years of hurrying through some things that needed doing in order to get to the “important” things. Or, putting some things off because they seemed less “worth my time” than other “more significant/creative/meaningful” things that I could be doing. I rarely find myself in either of those places anymore.
These days, nothing I do seems any more “significant/creative/meaningful” than anything I else I might be doing does. Every moment is sacred and every task, a teaching. I’m practicing a commitment to be doing only what I’m fully present in the middle of while I’m doing it. When I can truly be in the middle of whatever I’m doing, it’s almost always nourishing, delightful, fascinating or fun. When my mind or my energy is off somewhere other than where I am, I am learning to stop what I’m doing as soon as I notice my absence. I take my “absence” as a clue either that I need to be where my mind/my energy is or, at the very least, that I need not to be where my mind/my energy isn’t!
It’s a practice of following-the-energy. Being faithful to the practice means that I keep letting go of ideas about the when and how of most things. It often means stopping in the middle of things (something that used to be nearly impossible for me!). It also means endlessly letting go of schedules, deadlines and “shoulds” (my own or anyone else’s). It means having friends who understand the process and are willing to have similar flexibility when we make plans together. And, perhaps most of all, it means making sure that I’m always providing myself with a large enough field of open, unscheduled, uncommitted time in which the practice can unfold.
It’s an exciting, expansive way to be in the middle of life. Even in the muddle of the most mundane “maintenance” activities, “real life” is always happening; Spirit is always surprising me with magic.
Originally published in January 2002
