In yesterday’s gratitude I spoke of appreciating the physical experience of duality and change.  While some people lament the changing of the seasons, we all know there isn’t anything we can do about it.  If we look at life in the same way and follow the natural pattern of things, we quickly see that there is an inevitability in life that makes it futile to force our will.  I’m the first person who wants to uphold tradition because it feels right, the first one to imagine going back, the first one to want to redo things because hindsight is 20/20.  But time has shown me that energy wasted on what was and what we thought it could be is just that: wasted.  We are meant to change and we are meant to face the light and dark not only externally, but internally as well.  I allowed myself to get caught on the dark moments for a long time because I was raised to believe that the dark left a sort of mark on us, a branding like a scarlet letter, that we were never allowed to shake off.  I felt that a mistake was a burden we were meant to carry forever.  I was taught that our value was in perfection and making other people happy, making them see us in a certain light.  I want to break the habit of thinking we have control over anything but ourselves. 

There is no stopping time anymore than we have the ability to stop the natural order of anything.  I struggle to let the past go because I still have the scars of what happened as well as the scars of believing it should have been any different.  There is nothing worse than the amount of time we make ourselves suffer over something we can’t change.  It’s wasted.  We admire the change in seasons, and so many of us look at fall as a time of coziness and change and joy that it always struck me that we get frustrated or angry when we enter a season of change.  It doesn’t always line up with the big seasonal changes, but those changes are no different in they are just as inevitable and they are also part of the natural order of things.  We are not separate from nature, we are the embodiment of it, of all the infinite possibilities of the universe expressed in each one of us.  The light and dark are in us so, if we wouldn’t presume to stop the shift in light and the way the Earth turns, why would we try to stop that in ourselves?  In the first place we don’t have that power, in the second place, there is no need to have that power.  It’s our responsibility to take on the mantle of what works for us. 

Most importantly, understand that none of this is about control.  All things in this universe are what they are—and that isn’t a tautology or a negative, that is simply the truth.  We aren’t meant to change them, we are meant to learn to work with them.  We are meant to take up our place WITH them.  What we need to understand is that we too simply are what we are and the more we try to deny it, the more difficult it is to find our rhythm.  That isn’t to say we shouldn’t strive to do our best or improve upon it, but we shouldn’t try to DENY it and become something else.  We know who we are and we feel it in our souls the exact same way the Earth knows the seasons are changing, the way the universe knows it’s time to pivot.  With that, welcome the light and the dark.  Welcome the changing of the seasons within ourselves just as we do outside.  Honor who we are the same way we honor the passing of time and know that time, in the grand scheme of things, means nothing. It too is one of those things that simply IS, and all will happen exactly as it is meant to, when it is meant to.  Feel the light and allow it to shine exactly how it is called to.  This is our season.