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March Newsletter — Mar 11, 2009
The Equinox – one of the year’s two balance points, when night and day are of equal length – is only a short while away. Listening to the news, you might feel anything but balanced. You might instead feel a shaky sense like ice floes breaking up, as Christopher Fry describes in “A Sleep of Prisoners”:
http://www.gratefulness.org/poetry/sleep_of_prisoners.htm
This period of time does not look set to leave us “till we take the longest stride of soul we ever took.” Where will we come up with the strength of soul for that stride?
One way is to consider how the shattering of habits brings something new to birth in us:
http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/kali_nortonsmith.htm
This chapter from Felicia Norton and Charles Smith’s new book, An Emerald Earth, suggests “a choice to depend on a greater orchestration of events, both within and without, than our own planning and organizing could bring forth.” That’s no easy change for people as stubbornly self-reliant as we tend to be!
Another source of strength comes through dreams, writes Anne Scott. They “burst through our complacency, trying to reconnect us with what is essential and showing us a different way of living from our wholeness”:
http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/arise_scott.htm
What about that tough-to-grasp quality of knowing exactly what each moment requires? All the articles in this month’s Gratefulnews, especially Arthur Rosenfeld’s “Pay It Backwards: An Act of Coffee Kindness,” show how we don’t have to follow the norms around us:
http://www.gratefulness.org/gratefulnews/index.htm
A fourth source of strength lies in sharing light with each other. This month, you carried our candles beyond the mark of 7,000,000 million lit over the course of our history:
http://www.gratefulness.org/candles/enter.cfm?l=eng
Even that history itself has its own form of strength, as do many of our life-stories also when viewed over time:
http://www.gratefulness.org/a/history.htm
Paradoxically, there’s also strength in retreat. Imagine a chance not only to refresh your spirits but also to gain new skills for living gratefully amidst all the world’s shifts:
http://www.gratefulness.org/a/Art_May09_Retreat.htm
Allowing the new growth that comes from habits shattering. Making space for dreams. Finding unique solutions. Sharing the light. Remembering our stories. Taking time to retreat. In all these ways, we can awaken to the opportunities of having one foot off the ground in the midst of that longest stride.
Equinox blessings,
Patricia and Margaret
on behalf of our ANG*L Webteam
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