Autumn Equinox: A time to turn, turn, turn.
You can listen to this lesson and the meditation that preceded by clicking here.
This past Saturday, at 9:49 a.m. CDT, autumn began. The beautiful change from summer to fall seemed the perfect opportunity to follow Pete Seeger’s suggestion that we turn, turn, turn as we consider the bounty of choices we have living our lives.
The well known song performed by the Byrds (and written by Seeger) is a musical reminder that
Here my interpretations — and encourage your to explore your own — for a few of the verses:
For me, weeping is not only a signal of sadness or pain. I now know that when I cry — sometimes in response to an event or an emotion, other times just because — God is letting me. God is letting me hear and feel. God is letting me know, first-hand, Its Presence. God is reminding me there is no separation between my physical being and my spiritual self. Weeping is one beautiful way for me to know God. And laughing is the flip side of the same coin: a way to know God created us to be happy because God created us for God’s happiness. What surer sign that we are happy than our laughter. We are blessed that we can access and enjoy both a time to weep and a time to laugh.The definition of mourning is experiencing and expressing sorrow for the loss of someone or something dear to us. Most frequently we mourn a person’s transition from this physical experience to the completely spiritual. We are saddened by the physical loss. We can also be joyed by the spiritual reality of their transition. Mourning is a time to appreciate that our human time is a blink in the eye of spiritual eternity; the transition is a return to our true home. What could be more joyful?
And a time to dance? I shared the story of my Papaw. In the deepest middle of the night, a couple of days before Papaw made his transition, he suddenly woke from several days of unconsciousness. He and I shared this conversation:
“Hey, Tim, how are you?”
“I’m OK, Papaw. How are you?”
“Looks like I’m in the hospital; I guess I’m not all that OK. Let’s have a little talk.”
“Sure, Papaw. What’ll we talk about?”
“My funeral. I don’t want it sad. I want everyone there to say only good things. Not about me, about themselves. You’ll tell them that?”
Papaw wasn’t much of a dancer. (He was Baptist, after all!) I think his wish that everyone focus on their own goodness was a lot like dancing!
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;……
Robert Frost made it clear that a fence doesn’t have to separate people; it can make good neighbors. I apply Frost’s analogy to the verse regarding stones: casting them away and gathering them together. There are times when we choose to remove, consciously and actively, the barriers we experience between ourselves and others. We tear down the fences that we may know no separation, no disagreement, no disunity. And at times we choose to gather stones, to construct our place and space. We may even be reconstructing our sense of self, our awareness of what and who and how we are. That construction — whether a fence or a building — gives us cause to invite others to join us, to share a chat over the fence or to visit our house and “come on in.”
When we want and need community, companionship, the comfort from others, we create and enjoy a time to embrace. Hard to beat a good hug. And that embrace can be a conversation, quiet company, a shared walk; it doesn’t have to be a hug. As well, sometimes we choose to be alone, to reflect, to experience our individual (but not separate!) Self. As Jesus retired to the wilderness to be “alone” with God, we have the chance, the choice to refrain from embracing. Briefly, I hope!
This is a tough one because of the word “hate.” We have time to love, to experience the refreshing, reinforcing, refueling power of Love at any time, all the time. To everything and everyone with whom we have interaction, we have the time, the chance to know that Love. That is Spirit, filling us and guiding us and strengthening us.
And we have time to “know” the absence of Love, or “hate”. And I put “know” in quotation marks because Love is Truth. Since there can be no absence of Love, such absence cannot be truly known. We create for ourselves the opportunity to project the absence of Love, to imagine that Love is not real, not around, not active in our lives. As our thoughts create our experience, our reality, we can create such “hate”. I suspect Solomon was not recommending such, rather simply pointing out that we have the power to know Love or to project its absence.
Most interesting in the second half of this verse is the switch from the preposition “to” to “of”. The previous choices have been choices we can make and therefore experience. Concerning war and peace, they are times or situations or events that we are in the midst of. I suggest that as we view the situation in which we live, as we perceive of our existence and all that it contains and encounters, we can define it as turmoil, chaos, distress or as joy, grace, and comfort. The lives we live, the beings we become in our human form, have the power of Spirit and so we can recognize, realize our choice from the array of opposites Solomon lists.
As we turn from summer to autumn and as we have the freedom to turn between the several choices listed by Solomon, we also have the joyous and beautiful opportunity to turn within. To turn to our Truth, and that means turning to our Self, to the Divinity we each are. Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, says it especially clearly:
He loves to serve, and will attend faithfully to the most minute details of your daily life.
…..
Never be formal with God.
He cares no more for forms and ceremonies than do the principles of mathematics [care] for fine figures
……
You cannot use God too often.
He loves to be used, and the more you use Him the more easily you use Him and the more pleasant His help becomes.
A Course in Miracles seals it with this passage from Lesson #185:
No one who truly seeks the peace of god can fail to find it……
Who can remain unsatisfied who asks for what he has already?
Who could be unanswered who requests an answer which is his to give?
The peace of God is yours.
For everyone there is a time and an opportunity to experience the wonderful choices we have…not only “under heaven” but within the heaven we enjoy and of the heaven that we are.
Click here to listen to the lesson.
In: God, Happiness, Joy, Love, Oneness, Peacefulness, Spirituality, Time · Tagged with: Divine Spirit, Joy, Love, Oneness, power of good, Principles, Unity
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