The fourth in our ten part series:
Audio reflection, click here:
Audio meditation, click here:
This morning‘s journal riff, edited:
Life 101: a fall always comes before a rising, an ascent. The deeper and harder the fall, the higher the following ascent. It’s the resplendent phoenix that we couldn’t and wouldn’t have imagined before witnessing the ashes of desolation.
It’s the dance of destruction and creation, death and resurrection.
Our great teachers and stories remind us that the light shines brightest in the darkness, they urge us to always hang on, keep on going, don’t give up, ‘don’t you let go.’
No, no, no, never give up, never let go.
This truth lives in our DNA, it may be our most precious survival mechanism, our wisest guide, our creative genius. Faith, hope, love: the gift of storytelling, myth, and the best of what what religion offers.
Who we‘ve been for too long is laid bare in this age of information saturation, confirmation bias, misinformation, and race baiting, gender hating, sex shaming, climate change denying, mother earth raping, planet plundering propaganda.
Who and what we’ll become, we don’t know.
But here in not knowing live courage, exploration, innovation, invention, and inspiration; uncertainty allows those things longing to come into being to enter the world.
So today I’ll walk on air, step by step, against my better judgement, as our collective soul’s dark night continues unfolding.
Walking on air isn’t hard, but it asks a price: letting go of what we’ve held as dear and true, and reimagining ourselves in an unknown world that we salvage, reinvent, create, and bless with our thoughts, words, choices, and actions.
We who practice air walking, well, some of us hold tight the foolish, sweet, delicious hope that we’ll one day we’ll fly. And if wings fail, then we believe that we’ll watch the soaring of those who follow our fragile, faltering attempts.
I’m playing long game, and it’s bigger and bolder and more beautful than an election.
Like every lover whose heart refuses to give in or give up or let go, I believe that one day the world, and her politics, will be forced to catch up.
The greater the fall, the more glorious the rising, though I might not live to see it.
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Anne Lamott on Priorities and How We Keep Ourselves Small by People-Pleasing
Ani Trime’s Little Book of Affirmations: 52 Illustrated Practices for a Peaceful and Open Mind
