News from Jules | 09.19.2022 | Willing to Fall

Another season has passed since I planted my seed of intention for this year of growth: Surrender. This is the year to learn to be big. Of course, the way to “Spruce tree big, cliffside big…Big as in cosmos, as in love” that Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer so beautifully describes seems to require being small. Seedling small, gravel small. Small as in stardust, as in nothing.

And in order to “change the scale of space itself,” it seems I am once again in the process of turning myself inside out. The endless cycle of becoming by shedding.

The spring offered fundamental lessons on how to be human, to be present, to believe in others, to follow. The harder lessons emerged this summer—how to follow without resistance, without attachment, without control, without certainty—to let it be.

And now, as the earth rotates through the Fall Equinox this week, we pass into the second half of the growth cycle. A time when we can look at the glass as half empty or half full. There is still plenty to come in my experience—inevitably the deepest parts—which makes me wonder what else I have to learn about surrender.

According to The Circle of Life: The Heart’s Journey Through the Seasons by Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr that I’ve been reading to learn more about the seasons this year: Fall is the season of surrender.

This surprised me.

For one, I’ve associated fall with harvest and thus hustle. More effort, not less.

Living in the city, I’d escape to the cabin our family used to have as often as possible. One fall, I visited the winery down the country road for wine tasting. There were several people working at a giant machine out front, so of course, I had to investigate. Walking around it on all the crushed indigo grapes strewn on the matted down grass, I asked a hundred questions and learned all about the dawn-to-dusk rigor to pick and process all the grapes before the frost kicks in.

This matched my experiences in the work world hustling to get projects as far along as possible before productivity freezes at Thanksgiving through the Holidays. Thus affirming my sense of the extra elbow grease required each fall compared to the more relaxed summer.

This efforting is a form of resistance to the easeful cycle of nature itself. While it’s slowing down, we’re speeding up.

This is where I’ve been misunderstanding the growth cycle, this is the time of gathering the fruits of the labor—which can be laborious—but the labor itself, nature’s own nurturing of growth has already happened.

For two, I was surprised because I still associated surrender with giving up rather than with acceptance. And I valued any effort, including resistance, over no effort at all.

I realized this the other day as I was meditating with the guidance of George Mumford’s “Be Like Water” session of the Performance Course in the Ten Percent App:

“I was greedy. I wanted to be enlightened yesterday…so for years I struggled with wrong effort which means I was trying too hard, I wanted it too badly. When that energy is driving you to the point where you’re always looking to see how you’re doing, you’re not present to what you’re doing,” Mumford said.

“Dude, you’re making this way too hard. So it came to me that there was an easier, softer way. So I can have the strong intention but the process has to be one that’s allowing one to go with the flow.”

Whether or not the grapes are used for wine they must be released for the health of the grapevine. Just like the leaves must come to the earth so that they may decompose into nutrient rich soil for the next season of growth.

While we do pick grapes, we don’t climb up into the trees and pull off their leaves one-by-one. No, we simply watch as the red and yellow and brown leaves drift to the ground.

They are willing to fall.

So, just as nature is releasing and shedding this season, we too are invited “to let go, to yield,” as Rupp and Wiederkehr wrote in The Circle of Life: The Heart’s Journey Through the Seasons.

The authors pose a beautiful question: What in our lives needs to fall away like autumn leaves so another part of life that’s waiting in the wings can have its turn to live?

This must be the surrender.

And the reward.

“When the wonderful moment of letting go of something that is not serving our spiritual life arrives, however, a unique and joyful freedom is born.”

Perhaps this is what we are all harvesting this fall.

May your glass be half full this week.

Love,

Jules