If you were a leaf, everyone would want to look at you and celebrate you in the Fall, when your color was the most vibrant, and you were expressing the fullness of all your experiences. But we cling to the green. People spend a ton of time and energy trying to look green, and we romanticize the idea of wiping the slate clean and being innocent again, having everything ahead of us again.
The truth is, you can retain your innocence if you walk into each experience with curiosity. Nature is teaching us all the time that everything is always changing. Nothing living is exactly the same twice, so you can always walk into a situation with open eyes and an open mind and an open heart. And you can wipe the slate clean at any time. You don’t have to keep your past alive by feeding it too much energy. You can continually, “start again”, allowing yourself to open and grow and embrace your experience as it’s happening. Surprise yourself. You don’t have to put yourself in a box. You don’t have to decide you are “THIS” kind of person, or you would never do “THAT”. Allow other people and experiences to surprise you, too. Examine sweeping generalizations carefully.
When we are “green” we are working it out…our time of greenness usually involves some confusion and loneliness and flailing about. The wind can really whip us around as we try to figure out our purpose, and what it is that’s going to allow our Fall to be full of color. Why cling to that? And as hard as we cling to the green, we also resist our Winter, the time when everything hardens, and gets brittle and cold. We forget to acknowledge and honor and celebrate the wisdom that usually comes when someone is granted a long and healthy life, and that frequently, although the body may harden, the heart can be at its’ softest and most open state.
There’s nothing to cling to, and nothing to resist, it is happening. And if you consider areas in your life where you may be suffering, underneath that pain there is almost certainly a craving for something, or an aversion to something; craving and aversion are at the root of all suffering. At our core, if we keep craving the green and feeling aversion about the inevitable Winter, we will certainly suffer. If you can live your life celebrating all its seasons, rejoicing in your own growth, your expanding potential to spread love, and living in a way that recognizes your experience is fleeting, then you will truly want to be alive and present and open to each moment, you won’t want to miss or minimize or resist anything. You will want to embrace each breath, each conversation, each smile, each tear, each hug, each breeze, each rain, each sunrise, each heartbreak, each joy. Of course it’s human to fear the unknown, but if a leaf eventually falls to the forest floor, and is gently blown into the river, and that water ends up feeding the very tree the leaf grew upon, I think it’s pretty likely we all keep feeding the whole, feeding the LOVE.
Sending you some right now, Ally Hamilton