As you turn your calendar pages from not just a one year to the next, but close out one decade to start a new one, there is weight to that moment’s passage of time. At least, there is for me.
I’ve spent the last year fumbling, bumbling, stumbling through a design innovation book, Designing Your Life. It has been a tool for opening up my mind to possibility and also to force me to address what my core values and purposes are. It will change my life. It has changed my life. But I am still in the midst of the re-orienting. I still have confusion but it is no longer overwhelming. Dare I say, it is waning.
I spent a week at a hermitage on a silent retreat. It had been planned, its timing forced as the only open dates for 2019, and that divine provision allowed me healing from grief as well as stillness to receive quiet rays of light that were the imparting of vision meant for me. Over time, those first sweet rays will become a fierce noon sun of light, but the vision is still the rising of early morning pinks and yellows. I am still discerning.
I can appreciate that this rising twilight cannot burst forth without the closing of the day on a previous vision. It is that day’s death that births a new one. Maybe that is why I am happy to skip ringing in the new year with the drop of a ball. I feel the death more than the life. That will be something I work on this year- practicing all the yes to dwelling in the life until it becomes my instinct as opposed to staying in the melancholy of the elephant graveyard, stroking the dry bones of what has passed.
At my women’s group, we had secret confessions of tears ringing in the new year instead of champagne. A sadness that niggles at you in quiet moments and dulls the sparkle of holiday invitations. Why is it this month needs to be so much more momentous than all the other months? Have we sabotaged a season of joy with the pressure of performance?
I wonder if I have done enough with my past year, have I dreamed the right dream for the coming year. I have a place of brokenness that suggests not to dream at all to avoid all the disappointment. The unspoken outcome of that place is that I also avoid the joy too. This year, my dreams weren’t even ready. My 12 month 2019 goal setting calendar doesn’t even end until Feb 1. That might be an unexpected gift to myself.
I’m not behind. I’m right on time. My vision is still rising out of the darkness. I am practicing the wait with expectation instead of dread.
You crown the year with a bountiful harvest;
even the hard pathways overflow with abundance.
Psalm 65:11 NLT
Practicing Yes 