Happy New Year!

Sitting here by a crackling fire on New Year's night, I bow my head in gratitude for the love of family and friends, old and new during this holiday season. I feel blessed by the profound healing processes that have occurred in my life during these past few weeks and enter 2008 with a sense of peace and renewed "centered-ness". I wish you all a 2008 filled with light, love, and grace to handle the dark spots...

what needs to die?

I attended Radio 8 Ball last week (www.radio8ball.com). If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, particularly for fans of divination. Many of the questions addressed to the musical oracle that night revolved around the impending winter solstice and the importance of letting go of stuff, processes, and patterns we no longer need before we head into the increasing light of the new year.

After a year best characterized by the tower card in the tarot deck (ie. just about every structure in my life has burned to the ground), I know I'm ready to cast any remaining blockages and limiting beliefs onto the bonfire and emerge in 2008 on a more peaceful and spiritual path. But this is not always an easy thing to do, especially when it comes to relationships or beliefs and patterns that have served as protection in the past but are no longer necessary. Like clothing items that no longer suit, they must be packed up and hauled off. Sometimes you just have to trust your intuition, breathe, and let. go.

I wish any reader that happens upon this a peaceful and cleansing solstice and many blessings in the new year.............

Rumi does it again.....

This is a gem from everyone's favorite Sufi mystic, with all respect due to Hafiz, of course...

My friend, Tim introduced me to this one. It sums it all up for me right now...

BUOYANCY

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn't.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.
To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.

We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.
~Rumi