Persist, Listen, Expand

I leave 2020 as if sloughing an alluring frock. Watching its once shimmering, now tattered, fabric waft in the wind, I willingly release it and watch it vanish. I send prayers on its wings for greater purpose, healing, and life restored, renewed, or perhaps created into something entirely different.

This past year has astonished me as I have observed the amazing resilience of the indomitable human spirit. I have known it through history and occasional daily occurrences, but never like this. One by one, humans of all stripes have been showing up to voice themselves and stand up for what they know to be right, humane, and just. Humans throwing their lives on the line to save other humans on the street, in hospitals, in homes. My own daughter in full PPE practicing music therapy at hospice bedside. Humans doing what they feel called to do ~ live on.

We carry on in to 2021 so much wiser than we ever knew possible of ourselves. We have lost a lot along the way and mourned much. Our work isn’t through. We must persist as our ancestors before us, although never this path. We must be spiritual warriors, calling on the substance within, and be discerning and wise to know which work is ours to do. Listen intently ~ that knowing voice may be small or hammering over you. Listen. Persist.

Cultivate your resilience, find sanctuaries of silence and reverence for yourself; music or silence, a good book, a walk in the woods, your favorite beverage, and a movie. Perhaps a chat with a friend, meditation, some contemplative practice, or radical dance. Whatever helps you bolster your spiritual warrior so that you can dance on into this new year, do it!

For me, I am open to ways to expand. And in some ways, I have already been called to tasks, think tanks, and opportunities that have already allowed me to broaden my scope. I literally fell into a labyrinth, like Alice down the rabbit hole. A portal that has opened all sorts of adventures, including mad tea parties and experiences I would prefer to leave behind. But I have grown wiser, learned from the adventure and it has added strength to my warrior self and afforded opportunities both for singing and self for which I could not have conjured on my own.

I am looking for ways I can provide beauty and service in this new 2021. New ways of being. We are still Boots on the Ground, Voices in the Air but perhaps with new songs to sing. Persist, Listen, Expand. It is the way of the spiritual warrior, which is every human walking this planet before us, now, and after us. Arm and arm, let’s walk!