the light as it falls towards us, and saying yes

 Have you noticed how the light as it falls towards us is most beautiful at the edges of storm?

 *

 
The soul has its own purpose, its own agenda, its own momentum, whatever the ego or our emotional nature think. We just have to learn how to listen, how to get out of our own light. Or maybe – how to step into it.

In dance this morning, Kay said: 'Even if what is going on in you is NO, says yes to it...' and I smile and soften to my exhausted aching heart.

Here, now, later, someone mentions something in relation to one of my blog posts from November last year. At random I open this one, from nearly a year ago, just after I'd lost my mum. I smile at the synchronicity. It's relevant, maybe, to me right now; it's relevant, maybe, always; so I repost it and invite you to consider if it is also in any way relevant to you:

'I am thinking today about the areas in my life where I say "no" to a process that needs my "yes". How is it we vote to keep ourselves small, to allow fear to lead us? Reading David Whyte on this – how refusing to participate in a process that your soul calls you to "is actually corrosive on the personality and character". So many of our great writers emphasise this need to submit to greater purposes than our little ego wishes to, in its search for safety and certainty. Blake speaks of this; Goethe addresses it; Rilke too – "No more things will happen, No more days will open / and even the things that do happen will cheat him." We turn away from the possibility of change, from the necessity of transformation to enlarge us and our lives. We stay nose to tail in the line on which we've been put, like chickens placed on a chalk line who freeze, fearful of falling off. 

'We need to fall in love again with life, with all its demands; to submit to the inner processes. How many times today might I say "yes" when it would be easier to say "no"?'

The best gift we can offer to ourselves, I believe, is to say yes to everything life brings our way, over and over. What makes the difference, of course, is not what happens to us but how we relate to it.

* 

The year has tipped and I am now, just, a little closer to the Isle of Iona in 2013 (my "Islands of the Heart" retreat begins on April 14) than I am to this year's course, last April. (The photo above is from the boat on the way to this year's course.) Some of you know that I measure my year from Iona to Iona, and I know I'm not alone in this.  

Again, at dance, Kay played Mike Scott's track that includes these words:

 

Peace of the rested mind

Peace of the glad heart...

Peace of Iona.