passages

What is it that we wish to honor on this day? A life well lived and loved. The ground upon which you stand as sacred.The passage into a new season of life.The wisdom of the being that you are and that you are becoming. If this birthday celebration commemorates and honors the passage into a new season of life, then what might the season just around the corner look like? Perhaps for you it will be like autumn. Autumn comes upon us imprecisely. There is rarely a distinct moment when we can say that it has arrived. Cool days are followed by stretches of Indian summer. Fruit and grains are harvested in succession, rarely do they ripen simultaneously, each comes into maturity in its own time. Likewise trees in their own time reveal the beauty of their colors, once hidden by productivity, and let go with grace their leaves or their seeds, which become nourishment for the soil and the source of life for many. But regardless of timing, autumn is a season of comfort, of bearing fruit, of beauty revealed, of nourishing the future. It is a season of juicy ripeness, of vivid color, of invigorating and cleansing breezes. It is a season of great wisdom when you, along with those of your generation upon this tree of life, who have opened their leaves to gather the light for a time, enter into a period of intense radiance before letting go in a grace-filled dance that ends in blanketing the earth for the winter. Or perhaps your life looks more like that of a river. What lies around the bend for you? Such a life may seem to have begun as a solitary droplet, springing up from the earth, or falling down as rain. Contained within the smallness of the droplet, is the same material that makes up the ocean …yet each individual life is begun seemingly distinct, contained within a single cell, believing it is somehow different and separate because it cannot see the vastness of the source from which it came (although it is indeed encoded within it). Each experience of life then is an opportunity to move closer to, to return to, the source from which it came. The path of your life as a river has led you through many terrains, often rocky and turbulent near the beginning, with many twists and turns as you sought passage back to the source. Sometimes you may have come upon what appeared to be a sheer wall of rock, a wall built up perhaps because of the suffering that is so often the material of life,  but you somehow knew that the power of Love contained within the drop could dissolve rock, grain by grain, over time that was not your own. Sometimes you may have been asked to change your way of being or thinking or believing or moving through this world, allowed yourself to be transformed and carried by the wind across desert places. But each experience brought you ever closer to the river that quietly awaited, each moment of beauty or pain was an invitation to grow, to join more peacefully with the others, to open out and become wider. As the droplets of water that you were encountered the droplets of Love that were other persons and parts of creation, you gradually recognized that what appeared to be different was really one and the same, and you grew. (Sometimes I like to imagine these encounters and experiences of life as moments to be tucked into the pocket of my heart, as it grows and expands, until it is no longer able to be contained inside the single droplet that once was me). Near the end of a life in this form, there is a place where the water is peaceful and deep and wide, once again, like the metaphor of the autumn, a place of abundance and nourishment and beauty. A place where many come to rest, to bathe, to eat and drink. The soil here is also rich from seasons of life and death accumulated and brought forth by your overflowing. Farther along, of course, is the delta, where the richness of who you are will be deposited, once again for nurture. It is in this place near the riverbank boundaries of earth, that you will begin to hear the ancient roar of the ocean from which you came, and the ancient part of yourself that remembers will begin to resonate. And the truth that you speak will be heard and revered, as the river that you are can no longer contain what is of the ocean in it. And at that place where the ocean swells up to fill tidal pools and dissolve those last boundaries of flesh between it and the river, all of your accumulated tears and accumulated impurities will be embraced by the ocean as they become one with the salt water of Love… then perhaps your expanded heart will spill out its contents into the embrace of the ocean, contributing all its gathered and blessed experiences into the whole.                                                  All is well,                                                vicki