What pent up wildness have you released?​

” At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of things that save us.  Sometimes salvation can come as much from freedom and letting go as from creation.  What pent up wildness have you released?  How has that saved you or someone else” -Order of Service, Christmas Eve

Solstice, Christmas, New Years.  All of these holidays turn my introspective self even deeper inwards.  As I sat in the service Christmas Eve and contemplated the questions above, I was filled with gratitude.  I was overwhelmed by gratitude.  I’m not going to lie, it’s been a hard year.  It’s been a year of feeling everything from despair to ecstasy.  It’s been a year of giving up things that once were life giving.  It’s been a year of opening my hands to let things fall apart, flow through and disintegrate.  And it has been the restructuring and nurturing the new wild imagination that has been ignited in my heart. It has been a year of healing.  It has been a year of reunion and connection.  It has been a year of reaching far outside of myself and deep into myself at the same time.

I had a difficult conversation once with my father; one in a string of difficult conversations about faith.  He wanted to know what I believed about Jesus.  He wanted to know if I believed Jesus saved me, was the Savior.  The answer was true for me then and now, but unsatisfying for my father.  I believe that if we take the teachings and actions of Jesus seriously and model our lives after it, we are saved from many many things.  Above all, this year has been about bringing myself into greater alignment with the Source of All.  I have been working and praying and acting with intention to bring forth the unique work that I have been put on earth to carry out.  It saves me every day, this work.  It saves my hope and vision for the world, for my children.  It saves me from giving up in the face of violence, hatred and division.  I have released my heart into the world and this saves me every day.  And it breaks me open over and over.  It brings me to tears in the face of horror and the face of beauty.  It changes the whole world.  It changes everything.