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Monday, May 18, 2015

One Word 365: Looking Back, to Look Forward

This has sat in my drafts for five months. I can't point to any particular reason why it never got published here in this space. I'm posting it now. It's just as true today as it was when I wrote it last December. 

For the last three years I've had a word for the year. It's been my touchstone, a daily reminder, a daily challenge. It's been a sign post for decisions and a catalyst for personal growth. The last two years I've gotten to the end of the year and felt my word let go to make room for a new word for the new year. This year it seems to be taking it's sweet time. I feel as though I closed my eyes for just a moment in September. Now as I open them again I see December - which at the moment looks a lot like September. It's unseasonably warm and rainy for it to actually be the middle of December. 

My heart is still catching up on the whirlwind of these past couple months. It wasn't my whirlwind as much as it was my husband's. That cyclone caught me up and spun me around. I thought it derailed me. I thought it took all the growth of this year of become and destroyed it. I was wrong. As much as it wasn't what I wanted, it was what my heart needed. I thought I had lost myself, that all of the beauty I was beginning to see in myself was lost. I thought that all the ways that I had started to step into who my bones know that I'm destined to be had been buried in the wilderness again. 

In 2013, my word was hush. A word I didn't want. I didn't want the implication that went along with it. The implication that there was this deep wail of grief that needed to be heard. I wouldn't want to do that year over again. Without that hush, learning to embrace silence, to sit and allow grief to well up so that it could be seen and held by arms stronger than mine, I couldn't have stepped into this last year of become. I would never have joined Be or Story 101. I couldn't have believed in myself enough to have even tried. Without learning how to hush and be hushed I wouldn't have sat in the silent grief these past several weeks. Without that silence I wouldn't have heard the whispers from my bones that told me I wasn't through yet. Yet before I could hush, I had to choose.

I spent all of 2012 making choices. For a girl who had never made a choice for herself, who hadn't expressed and owned an opinion of her own until her 20s, choose was a daunting word. But oh the freedom it brought. The growth that it sparked. I'm still living out the lessons that my year of choices taught me. Choose empowered me to begin to live my life.

On the cusp of 2015, my bones are once again whispering to me. It's going to take everything that I've learned through these past three years, these past three words to even consider the word that I know is mine to grow with and grow into this coming year. Spirit is asking am I willing to become? Will I allow my fears to be hushed? Will I choose to follow where I feel led?

In 2015, it's time to learn how to believe. To hold onto hope, to promises, to faith - to shift another layer of my heart from surviving to thriving. To believe that I can tell a different story with my life. To believe that life can and will and is getting better. 


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