The Ides of March

Welcome to Spring, all! As always I hope this message finds you well. My intention here is also as always, to provide some quiet reflections to perhaps help you along your journey at this time...

This period in history, whether we like it or not, continues to give us all time to reflect on the authenticity of our lives and the world we've constructed. And if you're like me this experience has ebbed and flowed between radical surrender and extreme resistance.

Most recently for me, I disastrously tried to manage both extremes at the same time. So the result has been sleeping A LOT and being spaced out A LOT. I've had almost zero time with the television... limited time on the internet... done bare bones minimum on my responsibilities... stared-at-the-ceiling type of spaced out!

Only recently have I been able to come out of my hibernation. And as I peaked out of my slippers to see that it's light outside longer and that the temperatures feel better to human consumption, I realized we had approached both the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 Life and the Ides of March.

"Ides" was the word used to mark the full moon and the middle of the month (the 13th in all other months, the 15th in March), and is actually Latin for "to divide". The Ides of March was more specifically made famous by both Julius Cesar and Shakespeare, whose play, The Tragedy of Julius Cesar, poetically dramatized the Roman leader's demise with a soothsayer's prediction of his death. But I find it equally poetic that the one year anniversary of a global shift in reality falls at a time that symbolizes divide...

A divide between winter and spring...

A divide between turning away from social justice and towards it...

A divide between denying truth and asking, "How true is this?"...

A divide between loving technology and seeing it's trappings in real time...

A divide between living life asleep and awake...

A divide between life for the self and life for each other...

A divide between who we were before and who we are now...

A divide between recognizing our authentic selves and living our authentic selves...

...and some may argue a divide between each other, ever more lonely and angry at what appears to be our enemies.

We are (hopefully) fast approaching a time where most of us will be vaccinated and able to be together again in person. I can feel the collective excitement of a new chapter, warm weather, and celebrations. And while we all deserve a collective sigh of relief with fun and laughter and joy, the question still remains: How will YOU be living more authentically after we re-establish a new normal?

If the answer to that is as confusing as it should be, you are in the right place. For only in confusion are our minds scrambled enough to learn exactly what it means to live from the heart. Let this Ides of March be the marker to which you decide to get in touch with the language of your heart.