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Hi Everyone!
It’s the second of April and I’m feeling the chill and the promise of the season.
Coming correct to my best ability, I wore a more formal jacket to honor the inspiring audacity of New Jersey State Senator, Cory Booker.
I can say that my home state’s senior senator has demonstrably more stamina than yours because mine just occupied the US Senate for a record 25 hours and five minutes. This isn’t about politics as much as it is about the power of a person to stand up and take a risk. What are you risking today?
Sometimes the biggest risk we can take is believing in ourselves.
How do we get from one day to another and from one season to the next? Well, from our religions to ancient wellness traditions, fasting is one of them. For Christians this is a time of fasting, and Cory Booker made me think about that fact since he had to fast to prepare for a marathon without bathroom breaks. Seriously, that’s discipline, or maybe, it is devotion.
Luciano Pavarotti, the great opera singer is quoted as saying,
“People think I'm disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference,"
In this spring season many of us cleanse, detox or fast for our beliefs, and so we derive our discipline from our devotion. It seems like that power of devotion is something Booker honed in on as he prepared to take a very big, somewhat risky leap.
Now, I won’t let my Jersey Proud moment be the only part of our day or this week, but I’d like to use it as a portal, deeper into conscious consumption. I would like to take it all the way to poetry.
In fact, today’s video started with this bit of poetry from Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms.
You can hear more of me reading it aloud in the video, or go to Poetry dot org and read the whole beautiful poem.
Spring is a good time to wander deeper into ourselves, a good time to understand that we get a chance to blossom every year on this planet. It’s a very good time to think about these beginnings and not just about the times when we harvest the fruit.
This is spring. It is fitful, transitional, inspiring and despite its unsettling nature, it is reliable.
In some ancient traditions this was the beginning of the new year. In our own modern traditions it remains for many of us the start of our spiritual year. Whatever your inclination it’s a good time to reset your sense of what is possible, to reset what you are and what you are willing to be.
It’s a good time to understand how we devote ourselves to our health, our truth, our dreams. It’s a good time to think about dust and peaches and the bright power of the sun. It’s a good time to peek into the shadows, too.
In closing here and in the video, I promise to keep making these live chats available and to do better every day and week. I promise the lighting and the audio will get better. I know, I don’t look so good! Oh well.
I promise that I’ll reliably get out there in the mornings so we’re not having coffee at night, except sometimes that will happen too. I promise to devote myself to this process and nothing more. It’s too fresh out here to make really big promises now.
I’m not perfect at this going live habit, but I am devoted to you. What will blossom from it? We don’t yet know. That’s the fun, isn’t it?
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PS— I mention the joys of drinking cardamom in my coffee, and a little bit about what it can do for you. Like most if not all spices, there is medicine in that food. But, don’t take my advice as gospel as I’m not trying to doctor or treat you, and legally the government will attack me if I say that I do. Here’s just one of many links to help you learn more.
Love.
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