Rendezvous

I am meant for the new year. Designed for rebirth. The changing over of time, walking through the fire of transition is what I seem built for -- a spirit put into action by the promise of shed skin, sunrise, awakening, the giddy anticipation of all that is to come.

Even as December dawns, something essential and intuitive is released in my veins, pumping like opium, unleashing the dark and beautiful beast of future joy and pain mingled, the everlasting sign of change, growth, and creation. I crave it, need it like breath.

I am sitting still at the last. Watching. Something sacred. A mirror of life lived, cradled in the breaking of another moment, infinite and temporary, together weaving the eternal picture. Now as the sun breaks over nearby rooftops, radiant light against the rough, new-formed diamond of my heart, I am exposed to the shards of existence.

Would that I could bottle this for each day that opens. For you, my son, my love, for every life. And yet I see this spark shining from unexpected eyes, from unanticipated meetings, and know it for what it is. Infinite potential. Everywhere in everyone if only I am willing to see it.

And I wonder...perhaps the new year is just an unwholesome attachment to the inner landscape of my life -- to look inward rather than outward. Outward facing I see things that take constant care, relentless tending. In here I get to settle into the solitude of only my voice. In here I always get my way. I don't have to decipher my voice from theirs, my will from the world's. It is a place I want to be when I am most other places and I do see the folly in that. Yet, I cannot lie about it. It's a reminder that I am flawed and rankled with humanity. In fact, I love it, love to say it, feel it, be in it, wear it, my happy and guilty proclamation.

To read, write, sit and be still more often than not, is heaven divined. Like a silk thread that weaves its way between the homespun fibers of the rest of it. I am satisfied.

So, I am ready for this midnight rendezvous. I will put on my tender openness and bring it to the party, meeting friends I've traveled with this past year: fear, love, willingness, surrender, joy and gratitude. I will even invite the wall flowers to dance: reluctance, hesitancy, defensiveness, pain, resentment. Oh, dear there are a lot of them. But I must beckon them all along so the whole is retained, dark and light, like the time traveler who's pieces are dictated to follow lest he become shards of matter and nothingness.

And as with every year, my greatest hope is to remember this fresh willingness every morning I wake.

May we revel in newness with each passing day.

With loving-kindness,
Chantill