Springtime…Time for New Possibilities!

Every year at this time in the Western world, we celebrate the invitation to make ourselves anew.

In the Pagan world, the season starts with the Spring Equinox on March 21. It is a joyous time to acknowledge the rebirth of the soil and the land. Traditional rituals going back centuries before the Christian Era honored those symbols for creativity and fertility…..bunnies and eggs!

The Easter story reminds us of the tremendous possibility to die to the limited self and open the way for God to flower through, and of course the Passover story does the same in its retelling of the journey from enslavement to freedom – often as much from the ways in which we have inadvertently trapped ourselves as by the hand of others.

The of the whole Passover story is actually the story of the journey of the soul from restriction towards freedom. It is the very reason we tell it year after year – because the soul’s journey is a continuous spiraling requiring ongoing vigilance and attention. It is no mistake that the Passover meal was Jesus’ last supper. It was a time to retell the story, remembering the pain of constriction and reminding ourselves to move towards liberation.

We may well ask how such an immense task is to be accomplished. The Passover story exemplifies the process. The story is told at the ‘Seder’…a word meaning “order’ because it tells of the order in which we go about the process.

As with all good opportunities for growth, we first have to acknowledge that growth needs to happen- that we are feeling stuck and uninspired and limited in some fundamental way. Very often that which enslaves us is of our own making!

The next step is to go into our great silence…the desert in Moses’ case – in order to be open enough to hear the voice of inspiration. Once we receive our illumined insight – Moses’ burning bush, we often find ourselves in a trap of delusion and ego-bargaining. Time to talk sternly to our inner Pharaoh, the ego at its most stubborn and inflated.  How we deploy as sorts of bargaining tools in order not to do that which we know we must for our better good!

Eventually, after many trials and frustration, we come to the moment where we are thoroughly sick of our situation, and we have to make a move. We chose to no longer feed ourselves with the old and to move quickly towards the new, reminding ourselves not to kill off our new-found inspiration, our new-born idea.

And so to our Sea of Reeds…..the scary start where we have to dive headlong into the future trusting the way will be made clear. When the Hebrews got to edge of the waters they started praying, and got a strong message from God to stop praying and just “GO”.

Of course once over the first hurdle we often wonder around looking for signs and ignoring the possibilities right in front of our faces – we metaphorically wonder around in the desert, looking for false gods ( golden calf) and not seeing the manna that is feeding us.

Then it is time to go up to our highest selves – Moses go up to Mt Sinai- to access pour new guideposts and directives on how to live in a better way – the biblical ten commandments that aid to make life more conscious and enable us to move closer to the promised land…..

Ya Fattah as they say in the many parts of the Middle East….May the Way be Open!!!