Most people long for the April showers bringing May flowers. I am not always one to cheer. I find the spring transition with mud, fluctuating cold temperatures and the promise of warmer, even hot days approaching, to be a deregulator for my circadian rhythm. I am a person who loves winter’s darkness so moving tenderly towards summer takes a bit of work and balancing.

I know I’m unusual.

I do not like to talk about my aches and pains. I want to see my body aches as a gift adding wisdom to my aging sense of self but in all honesty I hate the fact that around summer I lost all flexibility in my right hip and those flexors still cannot behave in my yoga practice. My pigeon pose is gone and my high lift leg lunges are crooked and pull me off balance.

Hope illuminates our path forward in the darkness of our days.

Hope steers us as we manifest our dreams out of our imagination into our reality.

Holding hope is about holding the vision we see of our future self.

Without hope we can sink into despair. With hope we can develop courage to face our losses, our traumas, our fears.  There is a transformative power to holding hope in our hearts and allowing it to help us navigate the hardest of times.

The holidays.

All holidays carry memories. Holidays in n many cultures carry the feeling of a gathering or a community of family and friends. And when one person is missing because they died or left the family, that carries a heavy empty loss for everyone and maybe for you in particular.

I always believe it is important to nurture positive healthy relationships in our lives and to walk away from toxic ones. But what happens when positive, healthy relationships fall apart or turn on us in a dark way?

We live in an age where we want what we want when we want it.

We try to move faster. More efficiently. Work with the eye to the clock. Be mindful of our laziness, our diet, our time to exercise at the gym, and buy the best food cooked in the least amount of time and with the smallest calories that can fit on our plate.

Everyone grieves differently, just as every loss we experience, we feel in a different way. Our Grief Journey is personal, and we must heal in a way that is authentic to our loss and yet feel supported when reaching out to heal in the collective.

As I am writing this, I am watching the snow as it lies on the tree branches in my forest and the way nature has that perfect way of holding our hearts.  There is beauty and balance even in times when a natural catastrophe occurs or a storm rages through.