Embodied Life™ Newsletter Archive
All articles written by Russell Delman
Prayers for the Coming Year: Celebrating Dark and Light
December 24, 2020
Through tears and laughter:
May we emerge from this thoroughly unpredictable year into our next thoroughly unpredictable year with gratitude for the gift of life.
Our life offers us a choice: make friends with unanticipated change or struggle with unanticipated change. Actually, it is not a binary, not a simple yes or no.
Rather, we will struggle until we don't and the struggle is important until it isn't. For me it seems essential not to deny the losses and disappointments, even as we learn to bow wholeheartedly to the reality of our lives. Such a humbling balance:
May we find this deep acceptance without denial and blind hopefulness.
Out of Darkness comes the Light.
Darkness is the womb of our unfolding, the soil out of which we grow. As we, in the northern hemisphere, celebrate the return of the light:
May we remember that we are born from the womb of darkness.
Our garden grows underground, in unseen soil, nourished by the bodies of our ancestors. Right now, as the earth is magically marrying our collective roots with her rich soil:
May we also know that in our dark times, in our aloneness, in our sleep, in our not-knowing, in our struggle and in our silence, deep unseen, evolutionary work is occurring.
As we mourn our losses while learning to accept each aspect of our precious life:
May we also have confidence in the larger, transcendent process of which we are a part.
This is not blind, naive hopefulness rather it is an intimate, implicit knowing that this great body called Earth and all her life forms, including you and me, will forever be transformed in unknowable ways. When the planet has finished her journey in current form, how will All This continue? Out of darkness, the light emerges yielding unanticipated gifts:
May we both mourn and celebrate this great unfolding.
Imagine the change in our collective consciousness and the social world when darkness is no longer negative, when the dark is celebrated as a gift of life. To love the light and resist the dark is a rejection of half of our One Body!
As the poet May Sarton said in her "Invocation to Kali":
Help us to be always hopeful
Gardeners of the Spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
Sending Love and True Hopefulness..... Russell and Linda
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