New Day, New Season, New Year
Happy New Year. These heartfelt wishes can sound like quite the oxymoron, can’t they? In a time of increasing violence, usual personal and family challenges, widespread disease and poverty, and epidemic paranoia, where does “happiness” fit in?
We are, at our core, trusting, hopeful, strong creatures. These are the elements of spiritual connectedness that make us able to “leap”, however that may translate out in our well-lived lives; and what make us all One, despite propaganda, wherever it comes from, to the contrary.
Earth Incarnations are not for the Faint-Hearted.
Earth incarnations are not for the faint-hearted. The ego is happy to bypass this essential truth if it has half a chance, even resorting to the outrageous response of sanctioned violence if it thinks enough of a perceived threat is at hand.
Courageous Choices
Think Dorothy and her surprisingly successful entourage in the archetypal fable, “The Wizard of Oz”. It wasn’t just the cowardly lion who sought, and found in amazing ways, courage. They all experienced their own unique, magnificent coming of age through being tricked, inspired and threatened to make courageous choices.
We see that courage comes through trusting, as through the eyes and heart of a child, exemplified in the character of Dorothy. It comes from leading with your fully-released heart, like the tin woodsman. It comes from seeking to develop wisdom above all else and being willing to be shown a fool every step of the way, like the scarecrow. And finally, courage comes through loudly protesting every step of the journey that one is desperately, wholly afraid in every bone of one’s quivering body, like the lion.
We Become Heroes and Heroines
The ego is infantile and dangerous, yes, but is meant to exist in its right place of belonging. To find and seek above all else one’s divine right to heal and develop the capacity to make courageous choices transforms us into heroes and heroines; and so soap operas become myths which in turn, transform worlds.
Happiness is a By-Product of Balance
Happiness is a by-product of balance, which, spiritually speaking, comes from being in the flow of life as an endlessly transforming present – surrendering through every given moment to the soul’s directive to accept and experience all opportunities for healing, development and service. (Remember, concerning service, this equally includes Self and “others” – we can, in the midst of life in all its challenges, leave one of these essential elements out of the equation.)
The Essential Requirement to Begin Again
Courage is the essential requirement to begin again, period, let alone face another day, month, year that carries, seamlessly, completely, all that birthed it the day before.
I wish you courageous choices and responses in all your forthcoming days. Know that your heart was never faint, and leap to fully stretch who you are and what you are with a keen eye as to where you are going.