Good morning! We offer some thought provoking ideas from Sandy Conant Strachan:

Below is a photo of the cover of my current Morning Pages—my daily writing that isn’t a diary or even quite a journal. Rather it’s a collection of ‘psalms’ I began at the onset of the pandemic.

As you can see, my current focus is METAMORPHOSIS—— that amazing, mysterious transformation that goes on around and within us constantly.  We see it in plants, in butterflies, in babies.  The egg that becomes a chick or a child. The seed that becomes an oak. The worm that becomes a Monarch.  Every day is a never-before-lived day.Like everything, we face a profound challenge to CHANGE—-our minds, our paradigms, our living quarters, our daily rhythms, our attitudes and expectations; our notions of hope or compassion or productivity or self-worth.  As many of us enter a time when loved ones die or descend into dementia, we’re faced with fierce demands to “flow with Reality.”  The world at large is demanding deep and sometimes dangerous new responses to insanity, tyranny, threat.

And I’m more often than not in the darkness of the cocoon, stuck in (as a friend calls it) “life in the mush.”  I’m not clear how to respond.  Do I just accept what feels like inertia? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the rhythm of living is a cycle of birth-life-death-transformation. I do know it’s important to be patient with evolution, to trust that everything teaches, that creativity and courage go hand in hand as we figure out how to adapt with agency, not submission.

This is my prayer for all of us —- that we find ways to acknowledge our core of fear and uncertainty and to move beyond it. That we figure out how to fuel our lives with love rather than rage. That we discover new sources of courage.

Love to all, Sandy