Springtime
Life
“I don't
believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they
are looking for the experience of being alive.”
Joseph
Campbell
The bursting forth of
spring makes most of us happy. Like having the sap run up our trunk,
we wake in the sun and refresh ourselves in the rain of a warm spring
day. We trade our fleece jackets for tee shirts, our boots for
sandals, and we sally forth, renewed. Winter is over, the time of
darkness is done for another year, energy surges brand new. This, we
say, is what it feels like to be alive.
But, the dark shadow of winter, of short days and pseudo-death, the quietude and silence of
that season, is the reason that spring feels so vibrant—there would
be no spring if there were no winter. There would be no Easter
without Good Friday. No daylight without darkness. We owe our
feelings of being alive to our journey through winter.
We humans are pretty
quick to assign judgment—good or bad. We like nice neat categories;
we shy away from blurred lines and messiness. We prefer either/or to
both/and. We tend to find meaning in the light, and lack of meaning
in the darkness because darkness is so uncomfortable. Both are
necessary. The misfortunes of our lives sometimes produce the
greatest discoveries. Some of us find our true calling in blind corners. Surviving a challenge may bring the deepest sense of
aliveness.
But, it's spring! Let us
be renewed! In the words of American philosopher, Paul Kurtz, the meaning of life“can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life
and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.”
Enjoy your springtime life today!
In the Spirit,
Jane
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