Category: transition

The Inner Journey Begins – Day 247 of 365 Days to a Better You

Today those of us residing in Earth’s northern hemisphere crossed the threshold from Summer to Autumn. While Spring into Summer and Autumn into Winter are certainly transitions, they’re really just expansions of a trend already underway. Winter into Spring and Summer into Autumn represent transitional moments that result in profound shifts.

There’s little doubt that human psychology is hugely affected by the seasons. While the season change goes almost unnoticed in our modern culture, the ancients took note of, celebrated, and revered these rites of passage.

If you think about it, Spring and Summer with their growing warmth, expanding light, and blooming of life represent the outer world and our external life. The six months that began today, comprised of a gathering darkness, a pronounced chill, and the symbolic death in the natural world around us, are a metaphor for the inner journey.

In mythology, darkness often represents the night of the soul where the traveler dies to his old self and finds rebirth as a hero, ready to emerge back into the sunlight of the outside world. It is from darkness that light emerges. It is from the depths that the greatest heights are reached. It is in “the belly of the beast” that our true mettle is tested,

I’ve always found it important to connect with these cycles and metaphors. In the darkness, there is opportunity. It’s hard to argue that human life, culture, and psychology can be divorced from the natural forces that shape us.

So, let us embrace the darkness. Let us use this metaphor as a reason to go deep within, touch what’s real, and come back stronger for the experience.

We all walk this inner journey. It’s a journey we must travel alone. There it’s just you and the universe, you and your emotions, you and your thoughts. Not even the closest people in your life can walk that road with you.

We can walk it consciously or unconsciously. That is our choice. This time of the year, nature is leading you in the direction of walking it consciously. Let’s do ourselves a favor and answer that call.

Thanks for spending a few more minutes with me. If you’re taking something away, please share it with s friend.

Ray

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Times They Are A Changin’

“Times,” Bob Dylan famously sang, “They are a changin’.” You may have noticed from my earlier post that time and change are on my mind today. As I mentioned the other day, we’re in the process of selling our house and moving back to Kansas City.

Change always makes me reflective. It also has a tendency to make us want to cling to what is familiar. This morning I sold our 2006 Kia Sorento to the junk man and will be waving goodbye to it for a couple of Ben Franklins.

This was the first brand new car April and I bought together back in August of 2005 and was our main family car for many years. This, too, has been coming for a while. In the four years we’ve been here, it probably hasn’t been driven more than 30 times. I put a new battery in it last Fall, but when I went to start it the other day it wouldn’t start.

This vehicle never let us down. We never had one morning when it was our main car that it didn’t answer the call. While it’s just metal and plastic in one way. In another, it’s memories of trips to Manhattan to watch K-State games and 43,604 trips back and forth up Highway 69 between Louisburg and Overland Park.

This move back to Kansas is a new chapter for us. Some things, including this Kia, will not continue on the journey with us.

Plato recorded Socrates saying the following. makes “Heraclitus is supposed to say that all things are in motion and nothing at rest; he compares them to the stream of a river, and says that you cannot go into the same river twice”

In our modern world, this quote has been culled down to, “You cannot step twice into the same river.”

Time passes. Everything stays in motion. What was no longer is. What is will soon no longer be. That’s the nature of all composite things…cars, rivers, and us.

It’s only attachment that makes it sad. If we can step back and see the big picture, the awesome symmetry to the whole cosmic dance comes into view. All IS well!

Ray