New Year's Day 2016

Once again, New Year's Day has come around. The wheel of the year turns. Celebrations abound.

My New Year's Days over the past several years have been spent looking back in order to move forward. In truth, I've done this most of my life, in various moments of awareness.

As 2016 begins, I sit and write. It's my passion. I feel more vital when I pour my life, my heart, my words onto the page. As my words flow, it's as though my heartbeats even out and I am content within.

Reflections:
Last year began with a ceremony of acceptance of my own personal power in the world. One thread that's woven throughout last year's tapestry is awareness. All of my past days have led me to this one. How often do I get the opportunity to recall this? How often do I take that opportunity in a good way?
Spring brought with it a new camera and explorations of my photographic eye. I played with pictures, took workshops, progressed closer to expressing myself as a photographer. How incredible to be blessed with beauty all around and have a way to capture some of it and share it!
Summer found me spending three weeks wandering Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia with one of my dearest friends. Time flowed and paused and rushed throughout those days and weeks. We found a pace together. I relaxed into the new and familiar before returning to work. What an amazing, incredible blessing of time and presence!
Fall returned me to work, renewed and refreshed. New plans formed and played themselves out. New roles and new players blossomed into form. Days and weeks slipped quickly, quietly, noisily and freely by. It's wonderful to have a career that expands my world.
As the holidays approached, more changes arose. One who spent numerous holidays with me, could not this year. So I traveled again, spending time in a new place and finding peace there. Then returning home to finish the year with family and friends there. My personal circle often seems small in comparison to that of others, but it is the right and most beautiful size for me.

Resolutions:
Ah. I don't trust that process of resolution-making and eventual resolution-breaking. Simple plans and hopes for the coming year include growing ever healthier by continuing to eat better and exercising more consistently; reading more and writing more; continuing to explore myself as a photographer, traveler, pilgrim. With luck and blessings, those things will bloom as the Light continues to return.

What about you? How do you pass from the old year to the new? What shows up when you check the year's rear view mirror? Where are you heading in the coming year? What do you want to increase in your life? to decrease? May beauty and joy bubble over you this New Year's Day.

Come, Wanderer

"Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving -
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come, yet again, come, come."

—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh, or Rumi

(September 30, 1207 – December 17, 1273)

I share a birthday with Rumi.

Maybe that shouldn't be my most first thought when reading this. Yet, I've always loved Rumi. I first found his work when I was in high school, working in the library. It caresses me with its passion and intensity.

Wanderer ~
I've been a traveler, a nomad, a gypsy since a very young age. My mother said I habitually wandered off. When I was 5 or 6, I climbed to the top beam of a house being built in my neighborhood and she needed to climb up to get me. I promised to be good, to stay close, to let people know where I was going. Alas, I have indeed broken that promise at least a hundred times.

Rumi speaks from that deep place of love, the knowingness that someone is always present in your life, will always return to you ~ or allow your return. The call to that return is exuberant ~ "Come, come.... yet again, come, come." The invitation is not only real but overflowing with emotion.

Rumi's voice can be heard also as the voice of the Divine, the Lover of us all, hailing us, reminding us that there is a place for us whenever we choose to return to it. It's that open, passionate invitation that keeps me returning when I feel less than charitable toward myself, when I need to be held by the essence of Love.

Is there a place, solid or spiritual, that beckons you? How do you feel when it does? What draws you back? How do you "hear" the call?