News from Jules | 06.13.2022 | Learn to Be Big
Earlier tonight we celebrated the full and ripe Strawberry Moon. Three of us women sat cross-legged in the grass in front of our staff cabin that looks exactly like it’s from the original Dirty Dancing. We spanned ages in the 20s, 40s and 60s—appropriately the maiden, the matron, and the crone—with so much to learn from one another.
We called in the directions to invite the divine. We smudged around us to clear the energy. We shared what we wanted to release this cycle. And then we each read the poem “Big” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer out loud, just like when I first heard it while participating in a retreat a few months ago.
I was as touched by it now, a week before the Summer Solstice, as I was then, a week before the Spring Equinox. Surprisingly, not only a month, but a whole season has passed since I planted my seed of intention for this year of growth: Surrender.
So much has happened since then. So much is yet to come.
Go ahead and read this aloud so that you can really hear it.
Big
This is, perhaps, the year to learn to be big.
Spruce tree big. Cliffside big. Big as mesa,
as mountain lake. Big as in cosmos, as in love.
Being small has never served me—constricting,
contorting, trying to fit into a room, into shoes,
into a name. Let this be the year to escape all those little
rules with those little shoulds, all those little
cages with their little locks. Time to make of myself
a key, time to lean into immensity. Time to supersize
communion, time to grow beyond self. Time to
open, to unwall, to do as the universe does,
accelerating as it expands, not rushing toward
something else, no, but changing the scale of space itself.
Every time I’ve heard this poem it gets bigger, each voice emphasizes different words, lines, and passages, and speaks at different volumes and in different tones.
The same poem, except experienced totally differently through each person’s soul. Just like each of our lives.
Everyone on that retreat in March was touched when we first heard it. For our own reasons. In our own ways. Hence wanting to hear it, again and again. As if being seen and heard by each other not only amplified the message but our own confidence.
They have all lived into big shifts since then, just like me.
I am inspired to make of myself a key and lean further into immensity.
I’m pretty sure that the way to learn to be big is through the wisdom of Ani Depa, a Tibetan Buddhist nun and one of my meditation teachers a few weeks ago:
“The now of my situation is a precious opportunity that needs no limitations to its growth through hope or fear that form attachments and interfere with the experience.”
This gives us something to ponder, to savor, and to discern over the coming week. As we start to see the sweet fruits of our efforts blossoming, I wonder what big shifts we could all live into this summer?
I invite you to wonder too:
What is tense right now?
What is bubbling up?
What is distracting?
What is exciting?
What is calling?
What big shifts could you live into this summer?
May you change the scale of space itself this week.
Love,
Jules