I
t’s the First Day of Spring! The start of a season so joyous in my mind I host a brunch every year to celebrate the coming beauty with special women in my life.
Based on the calendar, today marks Spring’s beginning. But if you looked outside? There’s no way you could convince anyone it’s the Spring Equinox. It’s snowing.
Where I live, we will probably be lucky if it stops after 3″. A heavy, all day long, kind of snow. Yea, not exactly the begging you’d imagine for a season which brings warmth and color to our lives.
But it is. It’s both snowing and Spring. It’s not either/or it’s both.
If you think about it, that’s how much of life is.
We want clear cut lines; black and white thinking – good/bad, hot/cold, like/dislike, happy/sad, joy/pain, hope/hopeless, old/new, death/life, love/hate… I could go on. Our minds humanly want to put things into categories. It makes life easier. “That person is a bad person.” “This moment can only produce pain.” “You always…” “You never…” “Nothing good could come of this.” “I never like that.” “I am old.” You get the picture. It’s easier to dismiss that which we don’t like. Those who are never nice. Habits that will not produce any good.
But in reality, we are all both. We are aging (dying) but on the inside being made new. No human being is all good. We all fail. And same for the reverse. We are all big mix of good/bad, success/failure, joy/pain. Just like Spring when a season of Life comes through a season of Death. Without Winter? There is no Spring. Both halves are intimately connected.
As much as we want to compartmentalize life, we just can’t. And I think it makes things harder when we push and push to do so. Accepting this reality may be the tougher thing initially – to forgive those who hurt us because they have some good too, to see the joy that may result from a pain, to see new life being possible from a situation of death. But once we do, we are free to be at peace with what is real. We feel the resistances in our heart slowly wash away as the Spring sun melts the snow in our cold places within.
So may we start today. Today with this paradox of a day. To accept what is. To allow life to be both. To see the reality of messy. To believe in all the good, the hope, the joy, the coming life, the chance to start anew, no matter what circumstances we face.
May we learn to invite the vast expanse of possibility that comes when we no longer resist change, growth and possibility beyond what we see.
Let’s rest, let’s hope, let’s start to see anew.
Happy Spring!
