cycle of life

Ice and Water

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Dear beloved, do you exist in the manner of frozen ice, living in a perpetual winter, or do you live and breathe and move like flowing water? Have you known both ways of being?

All who walk this earth find themselves in the season of life called winter from time to time, a winter in the mind, in the emotions, a frozen heart, perhaps a time of grief.

GCW in snow

If you are stuck in the cold, you will find a way to cycle through the season of winter in your life and move on to the time of thaw and warming. This feels like spring with new life unfolding everywhere, giving way to the bank full flow in streams and rivers and the green leaves of summer.

When you are living in the seasons of spring and summer within your heart, your life flows effortlessly downstream finding the path of least resistance, moving forward with grace, moving toward the ocean with ease.

In summer, your life is like a river, refreshing all who drink of it, sustaining life along its course. The river of your life moves through the landscape, flowing easily around obstacles, even cutting through layers of stone over the course of centuries, to reach the goal.

Sunlit ripples, shallow creek

Then once again you may experience the biting winds and chilly air of autumn and into the frozen time of winter. All forward movement, all flow ceases when winter arrives, life goes underground and water freezes. Everything is stuck in place, frozen in time and space. As you have been here before, you know it is a temporary state. Do not lose heart, dear ones.

With time, patience, self awareness and self love, you can thaw the frozen and stuck places in your heart. Reach out for help if you need it. Your life can once again flow like water in midsummer.

Where there is forward movement and flow, there is life.

A New Day

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A new day lightens the sky in the east. This is life giving you another opportunity to start fresh. Life allows you the time to reevaluate and renew your life, to grow into the person your spirit calls you to become.

Nature’s rhythms show that you can begin again after setbacks and illness, after disappointments and sorrows. Spring follows winter without fail. The moon cycles through her phases each month. Storms roar through the valley pushing much old growth to the ground, leaving food and light for new life to reach to the sun.

A tree cut off at the ground will sent up suckers reaching for the light. Tender new grass appears after a prairie fire. Green shoots of crocus push through the melting snow in March. The world greens and leafs out finally after a hard winter softens into a joyful spring.

You too after the fires, storms or winters of life have passed may send forth green shoots, leaves, and blossoms and renew yourself. This may look and feel like new energy flowing through your veins, new ideas and creative projects, new vibrancy, a renewed sense of humor and playfulness…passion for life.

The sun will rise again and you will have another day to move toward becoming who you are at the level of your soul, to choose a new thought that supports you in place of the old stale thoughts, to choose a different pattern of being, to tune yourself to a more pleasant feeling, to take the first small step to realizing your dreams.

Of course, patience is your friend as these changes take time and attention and perseverance. Trust and give yourself the grace to accept yourself as you are while at the same time moving toward the new way of being that you desire.

Open your heart to this most amazing gift of a new day.

Promise of spring

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Sunlight gradually returns to our beloved valley. Winter still reigns with ice snow and cold, but the promise of spring warmth and light and growth feed my dreams.

Soon our community of living beings will wake up. Sharp green shoots of prairie grasses will poke up through last years dead stems and leaves, attracted to the light and heat of the sun.

My tightly closed buds will once again swell and grow large, unrolling tender green leaves as they open to the strong spring light. My beaded seed pods will grow and mature in weeks, finally splitting open to release my seeded fluff on the world.

Cottonwood leaves and seeds

The vultures will return from their southern vacation to ride the warm updrafts above the evergreens, weaving their figure eights across our valley as they perform their cleanup duties and take their place in the web of life.

Our fur bearing friends will once again play in the treetops and build their nests or dig their burrows, mate and give birth, raise their young, and seek their daily bread.

Hibernating snakes toads and frogs will slowly emerge as the sun warms their hiding places. They’ll soak in the life giving energies of heat and light, warming their bodies in pools of sunlight.

Songbirds will soon return and bring color, music, movement, activity as they select their nesting place and build their beautifully constructed summer homes, lay eggs and raise their young.

Female red winged blackbird

The eternal cycle of life and the seasons will play out once again in this small valley we call home. We dream and plan for spring, the season of renewal and awakening.

Spirit and Matter.

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You are spirit and substance, energy and matter…

To survive in a body, you must somehow get your daily bread when you are hungry, keep yourself warm in winter, find shelter from the wind and rain, clothe yourself and your family, find water to sustain life, and keep yourself safe from predators.

When your survival needs are met, your security is more easily assured. You may begin to explore the part of you that has always been the wise and knowing one who came into the body full of purpose, with dreams and with a full and open heart, ready to meet the challenges, knowing with a deep and ancient intelligence that you belong here, that your survival in a body will fuel the growth and evolution of your spirit.

The challenges you face can help you grow in wisdom, in compassion, will help your heart expand in love if you choose to allow it.

You may choose to let the hurt, fear, and unhappiness that occurs in every life make you small and bitter and angry, or you may use these events as fuel for the education and expansion of your spirit as you move from lifetime to lifetime in human form.

Your body is the vehicle for your spirit’s journey through life. You journey together as one organism. The spirit and the body are one until the death of the body, then the spirit continues, endures and the cycle of life begins again.

Will you choose to identify only with the physical and survival aspects of life, or will you expand your awareness to include the big picture that your spirit can access and understand and make sense of to create a better life for yourself?

When you belong to the Earth while allowing the divine light of spirit to move through you, you will be able to navigate through your life with wisdom, grace, equanimity, peace, and calm that will bless the web of life and all beings.

Joy!

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I want you to know what you might call the joy, expansion and contentment I feel rooted to my home and reaching for the sun, moon and stars.

It is my life’s work to grow to full mature height, to put out new leaves and bead-like fruits containing numberless seeds each spring, to be fully present in my physical being, to inhabit my allotment of earth and sky, to pull in nourishment from soil and sunlight, rain and air. 

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GCW in summer

This life is all I know, the seasons changing, the weather moving across my valley, wind storms and lightning, torrential rain, or mist, heat and cloudless summer days.

My leaves, shimmering in the breeze, turning golden as the sun dips toward the south, each one released in its time, thousands of them forming a brown carpet at my roots, enriching the soil that feeds me.

Now the late summer slides moment by moment into  fall…  fall into winter… Soon, I will know the deep rest, renewal, and quiet of winter. I welcome this time of release…

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GCW in fall

Yes, I have lost branches, they’ve rotted, fallen away and thumped heavily into the soft earth at my roots… I let them go without regret… My crown is thinner now, down to the essence of what is needed for life.  No more, no less.

Until I am ready to release life itself, I shall continue stand here with patience, knowing and welcoming every creature that shelters with me; knowing those that fly above and burrow below, those 6 legged crawlers  and spinners that live in my bark, the scaly ones that slide silently through the underbrush, the fur bearers that visit, the winged ones large and small that nest in my branches or perch momentarily on my crown day and night. I know their songs, their colors, their habits, I know the grip of their tiny claws, the vibration of the beat of their wings.

I know intimately those rooted ones in our community – the grasses, thistles, oak, locust, sycamore, the sunflowers, goldenrod, the cone-flower, the milkweed the Queen Anne’s Lace… there are too many to name… our roots, stems, and branches interweave, our energies overlap – we are a living neighborhood.  We know and communicate with each other. We thrive together!

This life is so precious to me.  It brings me joy!  Can you feel it too?

Late summer

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Growing things seem to pause now. Deep green leaves of ash, maple, and oak hang still in the humid air.  Butterflies frantically feed, flit and dance among late summer wild flowers…

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Late summer prairie grass

The new growth and excitement, the twittering birdsong of spring is a memory.  Now the grasses bend, top heavy with seed.  Dragonflies dart and zip above the prairie, sunlight reflecting from their glassy wings.

The new bird generations have all fledged and flown – Empty nests all around.  The insects sing their late summer songs, the chirp, the buzz, the whine of cricket and cicada, the tempos slowing as nights grow cooler.  The tree frogs chorusing their trance like rhythm into the wee hours, night after night.

Flowers that were bright with summer’s colors just a few weeks ago now fading, browning,  going to seed.   Still blooming, the magnificent plumes of goldenrod, masses of them,  swaying gently in the breeze.

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Goldenrod plumes

All the green rooted things hold their breath,  soak in the light of the  southward sliding sun, before the final days, the yellowing, the browning, the final dropping of seed and leaf, the dying down to the roots, the cooler autumn wind that will soon come and bring frost with it, and death.  The great letting go, before winters long nap…

Stand here on the cusp of change, knowing what is passing, knowing what is to come.  It is time for a late summer  rest.  Lie back under a friendly tree, soak up this still and timeless, day, this moment, before the sun turns to autumn once again.

 

 

Wheel of the year

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It is the season for low slanting sunlight, the silent message all living creatures are attuned to. Summer is past, winter will come. The wheel of the year turns.

Live each day, each moment, each breath fully, for the cycle of the year teaches us that all physical things change – nothing you can see, touch, taste, hear, smell, hold in your hand is permanent. Even the rocks beneath your feet will erode away. The huge trees that shade and shelter you will grow old and decline as young trees take their place in the canopy.

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Painted lady butterfly on red zinnia

You too are an integral part of the wheel of life.

Can you let go of what was once true about you and accept the realty of your now? Perhaps you still expect to see a physically beautiful young adult looking back from your mirror, but instead see a gray haired grandparent…

Beneath the physical aspect of our reality – which so many of you seem so attached to – lies your indestructible spirit and that, my dear will never grow old, never die.

As the earth cycles into a new season, as your body grows older, as the landscape changes beneath your feet, Remember your indestructible spirit that lies at the very heart of your existence here on our beloved planet.

The great release

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Once again we come to the time of letting go, the great release as the leaves we’ve held onto for so long this year are finally relieved of duty. For a brief time they blaze with breathtaking color. Let your eyes take in and enjoy our gorgeous color! Soon enough they become the soil at our feet they as they wither and brown and decay. Next year’s plant food.

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Red Virginia Creeper leaves

Now through the bare bones of our winter branches we have a chance to see feel and know the underlying structure beneath the summer show. We see what is rooted, what endures from year to year, through the cold months as well as the warm, not just the shimmering temporary summer show.

You too have an underlying structure. You are a web of invisible energy, permeating the physical body. This is the structure on which your life and body are built. Your energy endures from lifetime to lifetime without end.

When you keep your subtle energy flowing, healthy, and vibrant your life pulses with health and glows with vitality.