News from Jules | 03.20.2023 | Spring Forward
For several years now, I start the new year on the Spring Equinox as one of many small ways to live in harmony with nature. Moving through the four seasons feels more natural than following a calendar, especially this year moving away from the concrete jungle and back to the wild forest.
There are no flamboyant bursts of colors here announcing spring—entryways lined with yellow daffodils or purple crocus. There are birds starting to peck through the exposed grey rocks and brown pine needles and ferns decomposing beneath the thick blanket of snow that’s been melting over the past week as the temperature rises and the soil warms.
The earth is ready.
And so it is time to begin again.
According to Maia Toll in the beautiful and insightful Wild Wisdom Companion: A Guided Journey into the Mystical Rhythms of the Natural World, Season by Season:
This is the time of year to set intentions for our own growth, to pause in the hustle-bustle of daily life and tune in to our heart.
How do we do this?
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes an indigenous elder seeking snakeroot that used to be plentiful, but is now harder to find: “She stepped more slowly, opening her awareness, making her whole self into a halo of peripheral vision.”
For me, it’s during the quiet of winter that I slowly start to discern what the universe needs most from me and how I need to grow in the next cycle. The answer usually arrives as one word. The word is a seed that I plant and nurture for the next year. The next cycle of growth.
Surrender was my word for the year.
For my New Life Blessing in 2017, I received a small travel-sized Labyrinth with a deck of cards as a gift. The first card I pulled read, Surrender: I am ready to relinquish all and embrace that which remains…love…which has always been there for me. I am protected.
Surrender showed up on my path years ago, but I had been avoiding it. I wasn’t ready.
And then, last February, 2022, in the darkest time of night when I longed to go see the crashing waves on the beach and know how dark was the darkness but was too scared, I knew it was time to go there.
In order to surrender, I needed to relinquish control, release expectations, believe in others, receive help, and most importantly, cease resistance.
Fully letting go of careers and identities, past communities and friendships, my hometown and childhood memorabilia, so many dreams.
It was not easy.
As I surrendered throughout the past four seasons, I grew to believe what Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha blog founder, wrote on Instagram: “It’s okay to allow things to unfold as they will, because even if we think we know best, maybe there’s something better available than what we’re trying to force. And no matter what happens, we will be okay, because we’re strong—and those bumps in the road we’re trying to avoid will only make us stronger.”
And I experienced what meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer describes in “Weaving it all Together,” session 15 of his Emotions Course in the Ten Percent Happier meditation app:
“There’s something really important that happens in our practice when we understand that the difficulties we experience in our life are actually the greatest source of freedom for us. That rather than being a problem, rather than being in the way, rather than being an obstacle in our practice, they’re actually the place that our practice really develops the most…Every time we see one of those difficulties through, we have a little more space inside. That’s transformation—when we can see through a difficulty like that and not be as defined by it.”
It is a great relief to come through, to begin again today as we cross the Spring Equinox into a new year. For this day, all is in balance: 12 hours of night and 12 hours of day.
“Everything from what makes you happy to what makes you sad is brought to a fresh symmetry; you will feel as though spring is an opportunity to start over, to embrace the needs of your purest identity,” wrote Roya Backlund in her article “The Meaning of the Vernal Equinox Will Leave Your Soul Feeling Refreshed” from the online magazine Elite Daily.
What is the need of my ‘purest identity’—without the stories, without the labels, without the excuses, without the shame, blame, judgment and guilt?
To fear less.
Fearless is what I need to re-learn in this next cycle of growth.
Bold, decisive, and fast. Make a mess, be carefree, and believe. Say heck yes!
What I’ve always been, but forgotten. Like the bedrock beneath the layers of soil, taken for granted but holding everything up. And the sparkling crystals within those rocks, metamorphosized inside the heat and pressure of the earth.
So maybe less like a seed and more like a stone this year.
Fearless is the rock to unearth and nurture in this next cycle of growth.
May you fear less and spring forward this week.
Love,
Jules