 Dear Ones, Last November I wrote to you about lessons from leaves: on grief and letting go, in the heart of pandemic energies swirling about our lives, crippling much of what we held to be constant & true for so long. A year later, as many of us begin to finally come up for air, I am once again in a space of reflection within this earthly cycle. Each transition from fall to winter freshly shares the knowledge within trees hundreds of years old, seasoned in their wisdom, alive and ancient without ego or fear, a part of the cycle that has repeated for centuries. “Wintering” is a new concept for me (and one I plan to share more on, soon!). For now, I’ll just say I think it’s the ultimate season of surrender. For a long time I assumed if I didn’t let all of my feelings and reactions be deeply personal, it would somehow make me less of a person. Less alive, in a sense, since feeling the whole spectrum of our daily humanity is what actually makes us human, right? It makes us real. Even more than feeling those feelings, I was borderline compulsive in charting my responses with great detail - either in the flash of a moment, or through revisiting for weeks (months?) over and over. I thought if I surrender to this thing, this thought, this outside opinion, this less-than-pleasant scenario, I am giving up control of my life. It’s equivalent to waving the white flag of defeat. It’s losing, and it’s dangerous. Now I believe: Surrender is not giving up. It is giving over. Surrender is a form of detachment. It is neither kind, nor unkind. Surrender is freedom, and peace. It’s space, wide open, beckoning me onward versus remaining small and stuck. Surrender is trusting my organic ability to course correct. Knowing my worth, my place in the rhythm of it all. Then letting the rest fall away with softness, with opened palms instead of clenched hands. Surrender is like the trees transition from fall to winter: we don’t fight the natural cycle. We don’t rage against our ancient, rooted knowledge that it is time to let go. To rest. To let it be...to die, even. Because only from there, new beauty can grow. This is the energy I want to enter our next year with. How about you? We can ask ourselves when we feel our fight against surrender:
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