December 8th – Down Tools!
It’s easy to pile it all on – the shoulds, the lists, our work, our relentless moving on.
It’s easy to forget we are human, that we are vulnerable and it’s easy to convince ourselves to push on, push through, put our heads down and get on with it.
It’s easy to fill our days with tasks that exhaust us, that leave us depleted just so we don’t have to feel the sap of loss rising from our roots.
It’s easy to avoid our suspicions that it’s all too much, to imagine we are constantly expanding containers that can hold it all in.
It’s easier to do it all, to be everything, to be deaf to the parts of us that are shouting at the world – the parts of us that know what we need.
Down tools! Find your own patch of sky.
Down tools! Throw a pebble in a pond.
Down tools! Take time to tune in to your own quiet wisdom.
Down tools! Let something simple and beautiful carve a space in your mind – something like snow, leaves, the water drops in your shower – they are full of the grace of letting go.
For those of you in areas about to see snowfall here is a Billy Collins poem. It speaks of giving in to that slow mooching about, of noticing and of being that a new snowfall often brings – something that’s especially difficult (but very needed) this time of year.
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished, more
Without Issue 