What Makes Us Come Alive?
The jonquils are popping up here in central Illinois. Their bent blossoms always remind me of monks in white cowls bowing their heads, their thin pointed leaves like fingers raised in prayer. Wild violets have spread across reviving fields, and tree buds are inching their way outward.
What seemed barren, even lost for dead during the winter, has come out on the other side surging with new life.
I’ve often thought April would be a better month than January to announce a new year. Spring always feels to me like a new beginning. I sometimes feel sorry for folks in the southern hemisphere where Easter — that great testament of death into new life — comes at the start of autumn and the beginning of nature’s death cycle, rather than during the first blush of spring.
I consider it a sacred duty of springtime to keep watch over nature’s progression. I sometimes take a ruler to measure the overnight growth of the buds on our backyard trees. In a recent reflection on Easter, journalist Maria Shriver asks us to consider what makes us feel truly alive. It is an apt question for this season of new beginnings.
Most of my major life transitions took place when I realized that what I was doing no longer felt seemed life-affirming. When my job in daily broadcast journalism became more drudgery than delight, I knew it was time to leave. In those times when I didn’t let go soon enough on my own, God seemed to conjure up circumstances to give me a good nudge.
I wake up each day now joyful and grateful for my new work — writing books and guiding spiritual retreats.
What are the subtle and not-so-subtle nudges you are feeling? What are they telling you about what makes you feel most alive?
This year, after completing a new non-fiction book, I vowed to focus once again on what had always been my first love in writing, poetry. The student was ready and the teachers came. I credit an online creative writing workshop I attended last January, sponsored by the Upper House spirituality center at the University of Wisconsin, with helping me get started. (Visit www.upperhouse.org).
Once that spark gets re-ignited, it needs tending. I now attend a monthly Poetry and Spirituality Retreat online, led by the award-winning poet Lisa Breger and sponsored by St. Mary Monastery in Rock Island. Our group is a motley crew: a medical doctor, a retired judge, a visual artist, a spiritual director, to name a few. The only requirement: love of poetry. (Visit www.smmsisters.org/retreats/spirituality-and-poetry-apr).
What desires of the heart have you been putting off? How can you turn those desires into action?
A friend sent me this passage from George Bernard Shaw that I am using as my mantra and guide this spring:
“This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch I have got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
Shaw also said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
What is your ‘mighty’ purpose, your ‘splendid’ torch? Do not fear, as Jesus says so many times in the post-Resurrection gospels. This is a time to let your torch shine, to let your mighty purpose, like the spring flowers, grow.
