Contrary to many people, I absolutely love the long, dark nights of our PNW winter. (I didn't always though.)
It's a time where, when properly attuned to, we can dive deeply into our rich inner world... and deep embodied wisdom and truly aligned direction can arise.
We winter within ourselves.
Many people see hibernating trees as dead (Twice last week people said this to me. They are only appear dead to the untrained eye. They are in fact, deeply alive within.)
This false view happens for so many people who get stuck in over-doing, over-thinking, over-serving, over-eating, over-working, over-every-thing.
We become like hollow robots, instead of embodied, alive human beings.
This is when we get to remember the power of grace.
The Being of our Doing.
Grace is ephemeral. Subtle. Intangible. Too soft for hard people, who wish to stay hard.
Yet whenever we feel or see an example of grace, we can’t help but be mesmerized.
It’s perhaps the most unspeakable of any word, and though all language does fall short of any true experience, Grace in particular is perhaps the faintest of all experiences.
Yet, again, when we open to grace, we are forever moved. Changed. Even if just for that moment.
Or some continue opening to the sense… however difficult to grasp and hold onto, for it’s the slipperiest of experiences to attempt to grasp. The ungraspable.
It’s the ultimate of courageous and terrifying acts.
To yield yourself to grace.
It’s no different than when one molecule of air (be it h2o, co2, 03, 02…) yields itself to the one next to it, to the one next, to the hundreds, thousands, billions next… and suddenly the subtle power of grace as air, turns into unyielding wind.
You see the evidence of wind, by what it brushes up against. The movement that impresses itself upon your eyes or sound that is made that reverberates against the drums of your ears. You don’t see the air itself.
But we know it is everywhere. We are made of 65% oxygen.
You are mostly, air.
You are mostly, ethereal.
I bet you don’t feel that though most of the time, do you?
Might you allow yourself to open, even for a moment, to more grace in your own life?
Allow yourself to be moved. Bewildered. Humbled. Enlivened.
Allow yourself to experience grace more, and you’ll become a beacon for others to be awestruck, and they themselves foster little-by-little a greater capacity for grace.
Or I could say, less-and-less capacity for force.
And, when I say less capacity for force, I am not saying weak. Lifeless. Limp.
Remember the strength of wind.
And, remember that wind is made of air.
And you are too.
And you are not weak.
And neither is grace.
I find grace more deeply in wintering. In darkness.
Happy Solstice.
I love you.
Xo