So here we are at the beginning of a new month. April Fool's - I said I would return and so I have with a twist. Instead of ONE GOOD THING Daily it will be biweekly and I welcome a co-editor who will premier this weekend. I will let said author introduce them self.
Never has there seemed a better time to return with a biweekly gratitude practice. And I will be honest with you dear reader; the days when I could devote myself to this blog daily are long over.
But I did miss it and you my loyal audience. I have been thinking that this practice of gratitude and small recognition in positive thinking was probably a useful practice for myself and the world. I meant to premier on MLK day as I did with the very first OGT Daily....but life, politics, pandemics, little things like that sort of got in the way. So here it April first - 4-1-20- an auspicious time to begin as we here in NY dive into what could be very dark times ahead.
This is my theme then, darkness and what comes out of it. I've heard many say, "There's a silver lining to this......" Fill in the blank. And yet others who say, "People are dying, how can we be happy about anything?"
About a month and a half ago I was cleaning the house, something I rarely do anymore and suddenly from behind a cabinet in our dining room, I saw an amaryllis with four perfect flowers beaming at me in the darkness. This is a bulb I tuck away each winter in some lonely spot so it can hibernate and eventually bloom again in summer. I don't water it for 6 months or more. There is another one in the front hallway which looks a dried out onion.
Yet here it was in full glory startling me like a harbinger of something to come.
I pulled it out and put it on the kitchen table where we enjoyed it for an entire week or more.
But it was not finished because it bloomed again two weeks later, around my birthday, on another stalk with four more blooms.
Then at the beginning of March we became aware that COVID19 had hit our shores and NY began to shutter down. About this time I noticed that the dried out onion in the front hall had started to make a stalk of its own and gradually formed a flower head which just bloomed this week. So a third coming with not just four blooms but five perfect flowers like a star.
Nature is always startling me with its beauty and messages of hope and growth. And this is not the first time that an amaryllis has been a harbinger of hope and future in my life. Amaryllis as a symbol signifies pride, beauty and determination. Its name comes from the Greek and means, "to sparkle." About 30 years ago, when in my twenties, I introduced a friend in the film business to one of the editors I worked with and she was so positive about this connection that she sent me an amaryllis for my birthday in February. I put it on top of my film editing machine at work and it proceeded to bloom over and over again into the Spring, producing not just 4 or 5 flowers but eventually something like 22 in an explosion of fecund excitement. I would look up from my work editing footage of bombing runs over London during WWII and there would be another one unfurling itself. I took this as some kind of omen and sure enough, my friends were married a few years later.
Now I can't help but feel these new blooms are an omen of the future; of a need to listen to nature and allow the cycle of darkness to come back into light.
One of my favorite readings is from the 53 ancient 2nd century Christian scrolls, the Coptic bibles, discovered in Egypt in 1954. It is called "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" and it has the voice of a feminine wisdom according to spiritual teacher Joan Boryshenko:
It is similar to the song Jesus sang at the last supper where he claimed to be both war and peace, betrayer and betrayed. This speaks beautifully to the duality of life in balance. The need for darkness in order for there to be light. We must remember this as we descend into long dark days ahead even as the skies of April shine with sun.
It is good to be back.
Never has there seemed a better time to return with a biweekly gratitude practice. And I will be honest with you dear reader; the days when I could devote myself to this blog daily are long over.
But I did miss it and you my loyal audience. I have been thinking that this practice of gratitude and small recognition in positive thinking was probably a useful practice for myself and the world. I meant to premier on MLK day as I did with the very first OGT Daily....but life, politics, pandemics, little things like that sort of got in the way. So here it April first - 4-1-20- an auspicious time to begin as we here in NY dive into what could be very dark times ahead.
This is my theme then, darkness and what comes out of it. I've heard many say, "There's a silver lining to this......" Fill in the blank. And yet others who say, "People are dying, how can we be happy about anything?"
About a month and a half ago I was cleaning the house, something I rarely do anymore and suddenly from behind a cabinet in our dining room, I saw an amaryllis with four perfect flowers beaming at me in the darkness. This is a bulb I tuck away each winter in some lonely spot so it can hibernate and eventually bloom again in summer. I don't water it for 6 months or more. There is another one in the front hallway which looks a dried out onion.
I pulled it out and put it on the kitchen table where we enjoyed it for an entire week or more.
But it was not finished because it bloomed again two weeks later, around my birthday, on another stalk with four more blooms.
Then at the beginning of March we became aware that COVID19 had hit our shores and NY began to shutter down. About this time I noticed that the dried out onion in the front hall had started to make a stalk of its own and gradually formed a flower head which just bloomed this week. So a third coming with not just four blooms but five perfect flowers like a star.
Nature is always startling me with its beauty and messages of hope and growth. And this is not the first time that an amaryllis has been a harbinger of hope and future in my life. Amaryllis as a symbol signifies pride, beauty and determination. Its name comes from the Greek and means, "to sparkle." About 30 years ago, when in my twenties, I introduced a friend in the film business to one of the editors I worked with and she was so positive about this connection that she sent me an amaryllis for my birthday in February. I put it on top of my film editing machine at work and it proceeded to bloom over and over again into the Spring, producing not just 4 or 5 flowers but eventually something like 22 in an explosion of fecund excitement. I would look up from my work editing footage of bombing runs over London during WWII and there would be another one unfurling itself. I took this as some kind of omen and sure enough, my friends were married a few years later.
Now I can't help but feel these new blooms are an omen of the future; of a need to listen to nature and allow the cycle of darkness to come back into light.
One of my favorite readings is from the 53 ancient 2nd century Christian scrolls, the Coptic bibles, discovered in Egypt in 1954. It is called "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" and it has the voice of a feminine wisdom according to spiritual teacher Joan Boryshenko:
For I am the first and the last,
I am the honored one and the scorned one,
I am the whore and the holy one,
I am strength and I am fear,
I am war and I am peace.
It is similar to the song Jesus sang at the last supper where he claimed to be both war and peace, betrayer and betrayed. This speaks beautifully to the duality of life in balance. The need for darkness in order for there to be light. We must remember this as we descend into long dark days ahead even as the skies of April shine with sun.
It is good to be back.
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