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.

All About Dying

When I went to my Sycamore tree to journal Sunday afternoon, waiting for me on the swing was a leaf that looked like a magic carpet. I had forgotten how big the leaves of Sycamore trees are. I sat down and held it in my hand for a long time. The leaf took my breath away in its dying beauty and all I could do was sit and behold the season of autumn. I saved my journaling for later and simply entered the experience of being in and with this drama of life and death.

I have always loved this season best even if everything around me seems to be dying. When I sit ankle deep in leaves I feel like I am in a tomb that is also a womb. Sacred Compost! The other side of dying always seems like life to me even when I have to look through the dying with tears in my eyes. Autumn calls me to stop clinging, to loosen my grasp on what I think I know and embrace the beautiful unknown.

Autumn is the Season of Mystery.

Like trees stripped bare I cry out with autumn sadness, “How can I give shade with so much gone? My question answers itself as I experience the great mystery rising up in the heart of me. With the trappings gone it is easier to see the truth of who I really am. All I have is my poverty and God’s grace and the mysterious truth is: That’s enough! It is enough for me to be poor in God’s hands. The shade I give is God’s shade, not merely my own. This is the season of transformation. We are called into the prayer of centering. Let us return to the center. We let go of everything that is not God. In the words of Meister Eckhart I pray,

THERE, WHERE CLINGING

TO THINGS ENDS

GOD BEGINS TO BE.

I put the sycamore leaf down on the holy ground. I do not even carry it inside to my personal altar. I let the altar of the earth have it.

The Slow Turning

THE SLOW TURNING OF THE LEAVES OF YOUR HEART

Of course I am waiting for the brilliant flare of autumn. Waiting for that glorious nest of gold and red to sweep me off my feet! Today, however, as I wandered through our spacious gardens of trees it came to me that the slow turning is sometimes missed because we are looking for something a bit more spectacular.

Today let's watch for the slow moments of transformation in the trees and in the heart. For the heart, too, must learn to appreciate the process. Here is a gentle reminder from one of my favorite authors:

...There is nothing in your life

too terrible or too sad

that will not be your friend

when you find the right name to call it,

and calling it by its own name

HASTENING

it will come upright to your side..."

~~Laurens van der Post

Ah! Yes! But you must call it by name! And you must embrace the slow process of the turning leaves of your heart.

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