MINDFUL NEW YEAR

I offer you a poem by a man who knew a thing or two about transitions and living in a time of profound anxiety:

“I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things and they come toward me,
to meet and be met.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

How do you read this poem? As an invitation for your ego to go forth and conquer? That without you, there is no world? Is Rilke professing the same knowledge espoused by many of the modern New Age teachers about manifesting what you want? Or can you see that it can also be read as life being a process of becoming, “to meet and be met”? That there is a mutual dance that occurs when we soften and the line between us and the process blurs? The times that we are living through will not and can not be met by the first way of reading it. It can only be navigated by the second, by trusting the process and softening the self.

I invite you to use this demarcation of a new year to deepen your relationship to your Self. I sense that anyone who has concrete plans for a specific goal or direction right now will be sorely disappointed. It is a good time to be fluid and paint with broad brush strokes, set general directions and allow the unfolding of time to fill in the fine details. Anything that smells of the old ways of being will continue to be ripped away from us. The challenge at hand is to continue to have the courage and take the time to examine what or who is not serving us any longer. It is a time to keep clearing away the old and allow ourselves to know that we don’t know, instead of singing the same old tunes. These times of uncertainty are extremely uncomfortable for all of us needing the illusion of being in control. And yet, it is exactly these times, when attended to with attention and silence, that allow us to better understand what poisons us and what feeds us. Here’s to a mindful new year.