Surrender and Joy

These two little clay hedgehogs always find a place on my altar in January. Each year they receive new names and their names are my chosen words to live for the new year. In 2007 their names were Discipline and Contemplation. In 2008 their names were Laughter and Presence. This year I have decided to keep their 2009 names as I am not yet finished with their old names. I still need to do some unpacking, --and the names are:

SURRENDER AND JOY

SURRENDER is on the left side. She is a little closer to the earth...a little more bowed down. As I honor the beauty and importance of surrender I need to make clear that when I choose surrender as one of my 2010 words, in no way am I thinking about a door mat kind of surrender. It takes humility to surrender and humility is truth. In the rule of St.Benedict I am asked to give up my own will . Truly that takes a little (and sometimes a lot) of surrender. In this new year, then, I am praying that the Holy One, Source of my Joy will reveal to me the areas where surrendering would bring me a deeper joy. I have in mind actions such as:

*letting go of my need to be right, *surrendering stuff that clutters up my life, * letting go of my plans for changing others, * letting go of expectations, *surrendering resentment, *surrending busyness, *surrendering my own will, --

This may sound negative; yet looking more closely at my desire to surrender I am aware that every letting go in my life has always brought me greater freedom. The trick is staying with the moment of surrender when it's difficult.

And now I introduce you to JOY. She is on the right side, -- kind of uplifted...as though she is waiting for something. Perhaps she is waiting for the grace that will help her to be friends with SURRENDER. She is a wonderful companion for SURRENDER because surrender without joy can be a bit morose. JOY enables SURRENDER to see that she is beautiful even as she lets go, loosens her grasp, empties herself out.

This is my great longing for 2010:

to taste the freedom that comes

from living Joyfully Surrendered.

The Jubilant Dance Of Dying

With my feet caressed by sycamore leaves I am taking a moment to thank everyone who follows my blog and to say to those who comment, thank you also. There are times when you comment and try to publish your comment and it mysteriously disappears so please if your comment isn't posted it is not intentional. As for me, I'm a little sporadic at responding to comments. If I respond to one comment and not another it just says something about what is going on in my life at the time. Ordinarily I do not respond to comments. I do well to get an entry posted. As you can see this is turning out to be more of a MOSTLY WEEKLY blog than an ALMOST DAILY blog.

Rebecca over at Dazzling Darkness sent me some wonderful thoughts concerning the ALL ABOUT DYING post. She tends to look at autumn as a hibernation time rather than a dying because the leaves will return in a new form in the spring. She shared a poem with me that she has graciously given me permission to share on this blog. I love the poem and I, too, actually look at this kind of dying as a Happy Dying. Autumn is not a sad season for me.

One day when the air was supple and
full of hope
My life unfurled in a thousand, thousand
Shades of green.
Firmly held,
Tethered by my resilience,
I inhaled each moment.
Moving with currents of air
Or playful breeze
Holding my arms open to the rain
Turning in to survive the storms
Surrounded by murmuring voices
Crescendos in the wind.

I lived the long green-ness
With all the exuberance of
The innocent.
And then, gradually, the nights lengthened
The air cooled
and I plunged deep into myself
Erupting into a golden flame.
Until one day
I was strong enough
To choose to
Fall.

I was witnessed by one who said,
Fall is far too graceless a word
For the jubilant dance
That carries you back
into the ground of your being
Where you will always dream
In a thousand, thousand shades of green.

--Rebecca Johnson

(http://whateverelsemylifeis.blogspot.com/)

Let's all try to be part of the jubilant dance

that creation offers us every season--every day.

Autumn Surrender

Autumn, my favorite season, is a mystical time with a beautiful language all its own, a language my soul understands, no translation needed. A kind of eternal longing wells up in me that seems stronger in autumn than it does in other seasons. Perhaps it is my own forgotten memories of a source of life behind the life I now know, my own unrealized yearnings to return home.

…I often hear people talk about spring cleaning which involves anything from going through closets and downsizing, to cleaning the house from top to bottom. I personally like to use the season of autumn to do this. It fits well with the house cleaning that nature is doing. For the past few years, it has become my custom in autumn to evaluate what needs to be relinquished in my life. Sometimes possessions weigh me down. At other times it is my character flaws that burden not only me, but everyone who lives with me. I look into my closet and into my heart each autumn and ask, “Is there anything I could surrender that would help me become a freer person?

One of the things I enjoy about autumn is that, unlike myself, it looks like it’s having fun surrendering. There is a playfulness about it. All those bright colors and falling leaves! As a child I used to stand in the midst of dancing leaves on a windy autumn day. My face turned upward, my hands stretched out, I would gather the leaves in my arms like birds falling from the sky. On some days I would try to keep my eye on a single leaf, following it wherever it led me, which was sometimes over the fence into the neighbor’s pasture. One day, having worn myself out, my mother found me asleep in a big pile of leaves. The memory is a good one and I find myself wishing I would wear myself out playing a bit more in my adult years.

—taken from THE CIRCLE OF LIFE, p 186
by Joyce Rupp & Macrina Wiederkehr