Spring Resolutions

I think New Year's Day is a terrible time for making resolutions. Spring has my vote. Everything is budding and coming into bloom in the Spring. The energy is perfect for creation. I have a Spring Resolution that I want to talk about. It comes out of the long, winter months of shelter-in-place, where "nothing seemed to happen." Yet, something was happening: roots were spreading, invisible, underground. I am asking myself: What have we been gestating in this long winter?

Having the option of travel and many of my regular distractions removed, I was slowly (while dragging my feet) learning to savor the moment during my COVID-enforced months of solitude. I met my house again, and found it beautiful. I built an acquaintance with the local trails. I knew the morning patterns of the birds and learned who was there first to sing in the day. I moved away from my incessant, future-focused thinking and settled into body and place, at least a bit.

I am afraid I will lose that precious, new-found sense of presence as doors begin to open again in a world post-vaccinations. This is why I need a Spring Resolution. It isn't complicated. I just want to resolve not to return to business as usual. I want to resolve to continue my daily lessons in presence, savoring everything that comes, yes, even the uncomfortable bits. I want to invite in what Zorba called "the whole catastrophe."

I find myself impatient, despite my resolutions. These longer, warmer days are luring me on to the next thing, and the next. I look around my home and feel some of the old, familiar dissatisfactions set in. Where shall I go? What shall I do? Always the next thing, the next and the next! This brings to mind a time as a small child when my mother let me pick out a seed packet and plant those seeds in our backyard. Of course, I picked the packet with the brightest flowers, drawn to them like candy. I followed my mother's directions, setting out not-so-neat rows of seeds, covering them over, and watering the small plot. Each day I would check: nothing! I think I must have expected immediate blossoms. But one day, when I'd almost forgotten about the seedlings, mother took me back out to the yard and we discovered the first, tender, green shoots.

I know there have been changes, invisible yet real, that I have seeded during this long COVID year. It is important to slow down, notice, and carry forward what is growing. Maybe an element of this resolution I feel called to make is to trust the great cycles, in myself as well as in nature. We have invested much this last year. Would we walk away from the harvest out of impatience? I hope not. What do you resolve to carry forward from this long winter as we step into a new Spring?