A Time for New Beginnings

Time for New Beginnings - 

This is a juicy time to be alive,
Ripe with extreme challenges and opportunities! 
Imagine if life was a movie, or a novel...I often do.
It's a keep-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat, exciting film,
a keep-you-up-all-night, page turner of a novel, to be sure!

I won't lie. I do experience anxiety about the state
of the world, and fear, and sometimes even despair, 
but I don't feed these energies, as they can all too easily
become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I prefer, instead, to create.
Every day I re-commit to creating the world I want to live in.
We are all creators. We are all writing the script.

Here is what wrote down when I woke up on New Year's Day:

The Flow of the Mountain Stream

The flow calls me, guides me, brings me "tidings of comfort and joy".
Jade and emerald, ruby and sapphire, gems of delight, of the dark, of the Earth.

The flow of the universe is towards the greatest good. 
It is expansion and contraction,
Movement and stillness, 
Warming and cooling.
The inflow and the outflow, 
stillness that's always flowing,
spreading everywhere, and yet going nowhere.

Ah, Life. When we step into your flow like a kid at play,
a child jumping into the jump rope game, 
we dance with you, hop, skip, jump in rhythm - 
combining your rhythm, our own rhythm, 
the rhythms of our friends who are turning the rope,
inviting us to play.

Life, you invite us to play and we make it hard, 
turn it into work, serious, less joyful, more menial.
You give us meaning and we make it meaningless 
by ignorance, by ignoring your symbols, clues, maps, road signs,
and then insist we never saw danger coming.

No one told us.
No one warned us.
They sold us, instead, lies of control and consumption, 
the very antithesis of flow,
and so we end up empty-handed 
with troubled hearts.

But let's not stop there. 
Let's have that be in the midst of the script or story, not the end of it.
Let us open our empty hands to receive what we need,
listen to our troubled hearts and share with them the kindness and love that they long for.

Let us give up our isolation, our alienation from our kin, human and otherwise, 
and embrace the multiplicity, the divine diversity of consciousness in every form, 
from stone to star, 
near and far.

Make our desire to love and be loved quite personal, 
Love thy neighbor,
not just "the world". 
Love the discarded parts of self; the wounded and dispossessed,
the shamed and the shattered,
welcome them back in, back home.

Throw a party of reunion and see what happens.
Can you imagine?
Will you please imagine what will happen when we finally remember
that to flow like the mountain stream, 
we let our love and kindness feed the thirst of all who are in our path, 
indiscriminate and generous.

Let's allow ourselves to flow and watch what happens. 
Watch life rebound, watch hearts expand.
Watch children and elders take comfort in being cared for and about,
no matter the color of their skin, 
or the God of their parents, or the nature of their form,
flesh, feathers, fur, exoskeleton, or no skeleton at all.

We are one with the soul of the Earth, and each other. 
There is no escape. 
But in the flow, we would not want to escape.
There is great joy in being here now,
in kinship with everyone.

Aho. Ashe. Amen. Blessed Be.