Let Go, Spring Forward

I love the Spring - it's a hopeful season evidenced by visible signs of new life. Buds appear on barren branches, flowers burst forth, and the lifeless land becomes verdant again. It’s a time of awakening, when winters dim and hush, give way to enthusiastic chirps and, and with each day, more light. It is the "added unto" season that we most readily embrace.

It is our sense orientation to life that yearns for more, never less, pushing us to acquire some imagined quantity of good in the landscape of our lives that would become the bounty of our fulfillment. Somehow that version of satisfaction is never realized. We get something that we've wanted in place, and then something else goes missing. We get one plate spinning in the right direction and then another plate starts to wobble.

The ego never tires of the maelstrom of thinking that forever orbits within our mind, reaching but never quite grasping the brass ring of enough. We would want a perpetual Spring, when the promise of more at once seduces and imprisons us in the wanting mind.

Nature reveals a deeper wisdom, as does the high way of spiritual understanding. Here we behold the value of the season of letting go; patience in waiting; the fertility of fallow fields. Wisdom recognizes that the new life of Spring depends upon releasing the old life of the Fall. To retain the seed of the blooming season would deny the new life that sprouts from the seed allowed to fall when vitality ebbs from the plant.

And so it is that you and I evolve into ever healthier and whole expressions of Life when we release what would stunt our growth. Who of us cannot track some advance in understanding or perspective that emerged through a crack in life, when an old identity steeped in circumstances or conditions, fell away and forced us to look deeper within for our true self. I have my list, notches in my consciousness that remind me of St. St. Francis words, that it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Ancient religions took heed of this wisdom in extreme ways. Rituals of sacrifice were carried out in the belief that the giving over of an animal or something of great value would appease or coax favor from a reluctant God. One of the classic stories of faith from Judeo Christian scripture is the story of Abraham who is asked by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac as proof of his unyielding faith in God.  While that story may offend some people who could not fathom a Loving God demanding sacrifice of a child to test one's faith, or for any reason, it is useful as a metaphor in understanding what faith asks of us. 

What beliefs do you cling to that might be barriers to knowing the Divine. This is a mind field rife with peril and promise. We cleave to our belief of what life should be, like it was our beloved child.  In a sense it is our offspring.  We conceived it, raised it up from a tiny idea, fed it similar ideas, and grew it into the full fledged ego child that it is.  It is this progeny of our delusion that a Loving God would ask us to sacrifice, to give up, to let go of, that we might be free of what keeps us from knowing God and Truth and Wholeness.