News from Jules | 03.21.2022 | Spring Forward

Yesterday we met at the same park as we did a year and a half ago when I had just moved to the neighborhood. My friend was excited to introduce me to all of her favorite trees and plants in the park, especially the Redwoods and rhododendrons where we decided to hold our ceremony together. That was for the Fall Equinox.

So much has happened since then.

“Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is shivering into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes,” said Margaret Renkl in The New York Times article, What to Do With Spring’s Wild Joy in a Burning World.

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 better. It feels more natural to move through the four seasons than to follow a calendar. At some point during the fall or winter, I 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.

Last year, the pandemic inspired an insight that had been lurking, but I had put off accepting for years: I thrive in simplicity.

My life was anything but. This would require a lot of changes.

What would that even look like?

How would I learn about it?

Of course.

Simplify.

Simplify was my word for the year.

In order to simplify, I needed to know what was essential. To distill what truly mattered. What was necessary. And release the rest. Not just in my little life, but in the whole world. And to know what mattered, I needed to know what was.

I intentionally took off my rose-colored glasses the year before. And then I stepped on them last year. In the process of paying close attention to our world, I saw just how complicated, complex, extractive and oppressive my life and our world really are.

It sounds as depressing as it feels.

How can this work?

The lessons have also been incredibly uncomfortable and disorienting for a natural optimist. I sure didn’t set out to become a pessimist.

I just wanted to be more of a realist—a person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly. This seemed like the simplest way to be. And the only way forward.

By accepting, we shift our energy from suffering to adapting.

We hang in there and look for another way.

“Each year I see more clearly that I must be willing to pay the price of awakening: to wait without control of the process, to trust without seeing the face of the secret life that stirs, to hope without happy feelings, and to work with what seems to be little fruition,” wrote Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr in The Circle of Life: The Heart’s Journey Through the Seasons. “The way to that holy space within is the way of surrender.”

That’s it.

Surrender is the seed I’m planting and nurturing this year.

This next cycle of growth.

May you accept what is and spring forward this week.

Love,

Jules