The Spring of Winter

What promise a new year holds. It is a time when many of us become mapmakers, formulating our plans for new directions to the new places we want to go, charting our courses, fantasizing about the prospects and idealizing to some extent, but most of all renewing our hopes and dreams.

This time of rebirth kicks off such energy in some of us. I find myself willing to examine the parts of my life which keep me tied to results which no longer work. I want a change. I want to find a different path.

Why do we lose our way in the forest a few months after making these life altering commitments? January is filled with vitality and zealous affirmation. In February the momentum wanes, and by March or April many of us are back to old habits or at best revised newer ones. I want to make a firm commitment to make a lasting commitment! :))

There is something about a new year which propels us into a modus operandi of change and which presents us with a pattern to cut the cloth. Perhaps it is buried in the process of saying Goodbye to the yesterdays of the past year. Perhaps it is bound in the tradition of ritual. Maybe it is simply part of the seasonal shifting of nature. As the year ends could it be that we prepare for spring's renewal and begin to design our internal gardens? We are, afterall, perennials in a variety of ways.

No matter why resolution permeates the early days of January, I have determined that the most important gift I can give myself and others in the coming year is an attitude adjustment! It is time for me to look more often at the abundance of my life, to give thanks for the joys which surround me, to be more grateful and always to be gracious. Bad habits can outlive their usefulness in our lives and my whining is late to its date with the guillotine.

I hope that the coming year will bring peace to every corner of the earth and that the energy we learn to focus on this, our tender earth, will calm its inner conflicts and churnings, quieting it and bringing internal peace. The natural disasters of 2005 spoke loudly to this need for attention, for relief and comfort.

May we pay careful attention to Mahatma Gandhi's words: "We must become the change we want to see." Now, imagine the cummulative effect of such change....