A Different Form

I love words. Frequently they press themselves on me, demanding my attention. So it was no surprise when the word anew came leaping to my mind repeatedly this past week, clamoring for consideration.

It shouldn't have been a surprise to me. Even the physical world around me spoke the word. Yesterday, I woke to find a thin blanket of snow covering all but the warmest spots, and everything looked new. Untidiness was covered and clutter was blurred. Dead leaves and hibernating grass, which had been none too attractive, were hidden. It looked beautiful. It looked new.

Even the season is proclaiming newness. The solstice has opened us to light and vitality, the holiday season has turned our activities festive, and the New Year is only days away.

But while things may seem different on the surface, a nagging suspicion remains, that all the problems that have accrued, all the lacks that remain, all the unfulfilled hopes that languish...none of them have been transformed by the season.

We are taught that change is a constant. If it is always with us, what are our options with regard to it? We can fear it or embrace it, direct it or fall victim to it's whims, find the treasure in it or bemoan it's arrival, aching for what is familiar (even if not very satisfying) to return.

Here's where my word 'anew' come in. Anew means in a new or different form. Evidently the stuff of which my experience is made is the same stuff, however it works out for me. But that same stuff can take a different form. It can make my life anew...or not.

From where I sit, I have come to know that I am co-creator of my experience of life. The thoughts that I disallow, the emotions that I refuse to entertain, the company that I avoid, these are probably old forms for me, and ones that haven't produced what I have wanted to create in my life.

But those thoughts that I enthusiastically and repeatedly choose, those emotions that feel really good to me, that I seek and bask in, and the company of like minded people, whose dreams run parallel to mine, these create a new life for me, obliterating the untidiness, and making an opening for the clutter to be removed.

Here are cues to life anew for me, life in a new and different (and exhilarating) form.