Happy Spring! I hope this letter finds you enjoying the beginnings of Spring wherever you are on the planet.

I just returned from an incredibly aromatic experience in Santa Barbara, CA. The drought is officially over and there is a sweet sense of rebirth after the environmental challenges of recent years. Nature is so powerful in its resilience and potential for renewal. Here in Hot Springs, Springtime beauty is abounding in its own way!

Each season brings its gifts and opportunities and this Spring feels particularly rich in contrast to Winter’s darkness, Winter offers its own stark beauty and opportunities but often we don’t see it this way. This winter, after many dark, cold and cloudy days, I got tired of complaining and decided to enjoy the weather, however it was appearing.

I bundled up in a number of layers and took myself on a hike. Within an hour, all the layers were gone and the sun was shining on my back! Did I do that? Life is so funny and mysterious sometimes, especially when we are open to seeing it that way. I have been thinking about the how the outer weather can be a reflection of our inner emotional weather. Some days we wake up full of Springtime creativity or Summertime
enthusiasm or Autumn’s feeling of loss and letting go, or Winter’s reflective inwardness.

How would it be to celebrate all of it? Not judge the inner or the outer weather? Obviously, we will probably all continue to have a preference for perfect weather and perfectly happy moods and, we can see that without the contrast there would be no appreciation of the opposite.

This seems to be a simple way of describing what us humans are doing down here on the planet – learning to unconditionally love (or at least accept : ) all of it – not expecting life, ourselves or others to conform to how we think we / it should be to suit our personal desires.

We can see how we too are Nature. We, like Nature, are imbued with the very same intelligent life-force as the natural world, with the very same capacity for resilience and renewal. Life is filled with immense possibility when we are open to seeing things differently.