Even though we breathe,
We forget to breathe.
Bring your mind to your breath and take a deep and cleansing breath in.
Let it go.
Inhale once more and let it go.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
If you live where there is snow,
You know that in general,
You want to avoid yellow snow.
To put a fine point on it,
White snow is courtesy of the sky.
Yellow snow is generally courtesy of someone's or something's bladder.
But as I was out walking in some favorite woods of mine recently,
I was surrounded by yellow snow.
This yellow came from the dead leaves on the ground.
Their color was leeching into the white snow and it was a stunning display of deterioration and decay,
Or what is also known as entropy.
I've been thinking a great deal about entropy lately and there have been multiple reasons for this.
The first is because the bright light of two dear souls,
Those bright lights are no longer in this world.
And that makes me sad.
The second has to do with my 104 year old house that I recently bought.
I just noticed a crack in the ceiling upstairs and there might be moisture.
And there's another crack in the basement and another one in the bathroom.
Since I can't even nail a nail and I'm not exaggerating,
Will my house soon come tumbling down around me?
The last reason I've been thinking about entropy is because of a rabbit.
The poor rabbit got hit by a car on the road outside of my house.
I joked with someone that in my last house,
The entropy that I got to watch with delight because it meant that spring was coming was when the ice on the lake would go out.
Now the entropy in this house that I get to witness is when will the snow melt and reveal the carcass that the snow plow in all likelihood tossed into my yard?
I do not take lightly the death of a rabbit.
As my kids will tell you if I happen to hit an animal with my car,
I am devastated.
But waiting for the carcass to appear in my yard sort of seems like that could be a metaphor for 2020.
Inhale.
Exhale.
As I was walking in those woods,
As I saw the yellow snow,
I realized entropy is not only natural,
It is a law in thermodynamics after all.
Entropy offers us two critical lessons.
The first is how to release.
The second is the importance of repair.
When my life was hard,
The metaphor that I would often go to was that a huge eye bolt had been screwed into the back of my head,
Right where my skull and neck met.
Connected to that eye bolt was a thick and heavy chain,
And that chain was wrapped around a boulder,
Which I had to drag around the world.
You see,
I was afraid to let go of certain things,
Even though I knew they were causing great harm to my spirit.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Perhaps you can think of things that are deteriorating or dying,
Ways of being that no longer work for you,
Things that weigh you down.
We can continue to carry those things around,
Out of habit,
Fear,
Or we can put down those things,
Release ourselves from the burden and the pain,
And walk on.
But there are other times when something that we cherish is broken,
And then we want to do our best to repair.
If that's the choice we choose,
We need to gather up the pieces.
We must carefully reconstruct and rebuild.
We must do the work to put things back together.
Because you know what?
Ignoring the problem probably is not going to make it go away.
So when things get challenging,
It's an opportunity to ask yourself,
Is this something I need to release?
Or is it something I want to repair?
And then do that.
Now I know,
I know that's easier said than done.
So maybe all we can do is keep the question in mind.
Do I want to release or do I want to repair?
Because things fall apart.
It's what things do.
We can't stop that.
And sometimes we simply have to sit with the grief of that.
But then there are other times where we can choose what we do.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Namaste.
