Category: Seasons

Love, Gratitude, and Peace

21/1/2014

This photo is my 8 year old self with my godmother Renate.

I've been doing daily energy work sessions with her since the holidays, as she is approaching her final transitioning. It's been a sweet and sometimes delicate process of being with her as she is leaving this life slowly. I call her, and if she feels up to talking she shares with me how she is and what she needs, and then we hang up and I do long distance energy work (she is in Germany). She says the energy work helps her be in less pain, sleep better, and feel more at peace.

At times, she's struggling with the many aspects of her body deteriorating with the effects of an inoperable cancer. At other times, especially lately, she is full of gratitude for her life, even now. There is a peace that radiates out from her that touches me and pulls me into it, too. It's been a real gift to witness this process as she opens to the Light and to the Peace that she is moving into. The gratitude is as much mine as it is hers. Her radiance touches my heart, and so does her very human fragility. It's a mysterious process that she is in, unpredictable from one day to the next, but so very sacred.

I used to love my aunt Renate so totally as only children can love. Then our lives moved apart for a long time ... to intertwine again when I saw her last summer, just after she had received her cancer diagnosis. So this blog is lovingly dedicated to Renate, to our connection, and to the loving giving and receiving that has been part of it since it started. I am happy I can accompany you and return loving care to you now, dear Renate, before you leave us for good! May you journey gently and easily!

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When Things Fall Apart

22/1/2013

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Stay open to things falling into place in ways that you simply couldn’t have dreamt of before, and then who knows what will happen?

I recently came across this image on the internet. Interesting thought, isn’t it?

I’ll come back to it in a moment.This year’s winter is tough on us. The colder and snowier the winter, the more of our energy it takes to deal with it: shoveling snow, staying warm, keeping in good spirits. Conversely, the less energy we have for our day-to-day life, work, and projects, including the famous New Year’s resolutions. So the good intentions we had for this year may already be falling by the wayside. Victims of a hard winter? Not only, of course, but it does take energy to focus, and when our energy is taken up elsewhere it’s definitely harder to pursue our new goals and projects.

So let’s take a moment to be kind with ourselves. Let’s allow ourselves to be human-all-too-human without berating ourselves or giving ourselves bad grades. A rough winter is enough of a challenge, there’s no need to add insult to injury.

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Fall walk

14/10/2012

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Fall is such a short-lived experience of exuberant, utter beauty that I decided to capture some of it this year and publish it as a blog. So here is a visual impression of a walk in the Laurentian mountains. Day after day, the landscape changes its look. Day after day, the trees change their colors and shape. Day after day, the carpet of leaves on which I walk transforms. A true experience in what buddhists traditionally refer to as the impermanence of life.

Below is a slide show of some of the vistas. Enjoy!

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Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

3/10/2012

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Fall is at its most colorful stage right now in the Laurentians. A few days ago, I asked the friend I was with how she felt about fall as we were walking on paths sprinkled with fallen leaf touches of yellow and red. She is a real summer girl, and I could guess her answer: the colors were still ok, she said, but she definitely couldn’t stand the grey, barren, rainy-cold part of it. Who does, for that matter? When the magnificent, sparkly finale of nature’s yearly life cycle is over, all that is left, it seems, is a slow descent into the underworld of decay and death. Winter will mercifully cover it all over with its pristine whiteness, but make no mistake, it’ll freeze everything into place for a good while.

It’s interesting to look at the seasons as a way of learning about our own life cycles. Every year, we experience Nature as it goes through its own characteristic life cycle. Starting with the buds bursting into new life in spring, it moves into full, vibrant expansion in the summer, to then slowly decline in the fall and lie barren during the winter. For sure, spring and summer are more inspiring to us, as they display the growth and expansion part of the cycle. Fall and winter, by contrast, represent the decline and death part of it, and this seems less easy to accept somehow. But a cycle, by its very nature, contains both halves: without the second half of ‘fall and winter’ we would never arrive back at spring. Of course we can dream about eternal spring as a paradisiacal kind of steady state, or about continuous growth and expansion as an ever increasing line going up and up and up. But we’re then not dealing with cycles, we’re talking about straight lines.

There is a lot of investment in our culture in making us believe that everything could develop along a straight line of expansion, whether it’s our own personal growth or that of the economy. This is appealing, of course, because everything seems to get better all the time. There would only be gain, and we wouldn’t have to face any loss. Is that true, though? Is that really how things are? What if cycles are better models for understanding how life unfolds?

I won’t go into the economy or politics, as that’s really not my field of expertise. I do know a fair bit about the dynamics of our inner life, though, and my experience is that people have a really hard time when it comes to accepting loss. Loss is inevitable as a cycle goes into its ‘fall and winter’ part and thus towards its own end. Friendships, relationships, or partnerships may move past their prime and eventually fall away, and jobs may be lost as part of a greater economic cycle that starts declining. There’s no denying that loss can be very painful, but it can be comforting to realize that as one of our cycles comes to an end, others may be in full expansion, and yet others are ready to start off. When we accept that our life has its own seasons and cycles, we’ll be able to follow it more graciously into its falls and winters, just as we will naturally enjoy and celebrate its springs and summers.

So this fall, as the leaves whirl in their last flamboyant dance, we could look whether there are cycles in our own lives that are moving into fall, as it were. We can check with ourselves whether we’re willing to go along with that movement or whether we’re resisting it. For sure, peace lies in letting Life lead us in its own unfathomable dance.

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Love, Gratitude, and Peace

When Things Fall Apart

Fall walk

Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

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Love, Gratitude, and Peace

When Things Fall Apart

Fall walk

Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

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