After a quarter century of watching the ball drop, waiting for all to exclaim Happy New Year, and looking for someone to kiss at midnight, I must say there is something still mysterious about the pivotal moment of midnight on the last day of the old year, and the first day of the new year.
As a society, we impress a lot upon that moment. And, truthfully, life continues on usually the exact same. There is a usual communal agreement to say good bye to the time behind, and embrace a clean slate of a year ahead with resolutions, goals, and projects to look forward to.
This new year, however, for me, brings a real sense of great change. And hope.
Only days before the new year, I read a book that I think has changed my life. Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven is a man's personal account of his experience contracting an extremely rare case of meningitis, going in to a coma, having a near death experience--literally taking him to 'the other side' so to speak--to heaven, some might say, and living to tell his story.
His encounter is exhilarating, inspiring and moving.
It was a wonderful reminder, and I say reminder, because I feel at some deep, perhaps subconscious level, I know all this to be true--that love presides over everything, and that this life is merely an instructional tool to help us reach heights in the next realm.
For clarity's sake, Dr. Alexander refers to the supreme heavenly being in his retelling as Om. Some might call that God, Atman...
He writes,
"Through the Orb, Om told me that there is not one universe, but many--in fact, more than I could conceive--but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth--no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant."His story continues on, and expands to include beautiful and inexplicable experiences, which he then brings back to his existence here on this earthly plane, and tries his best to both parse out that experience, and then begin to meld it back together with his bodily life here on Earth.
2012 must have been the year for books that change my life, for earlier in 2012, I read Eva Le Gallienne's The Mystic in the Theatre. The book is an extremely moving homage to the great turn of the century Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Le Gallienne idolized Duse as a young actress performing in New York City. They corresponded mostly through letters toward the end of Duse's life and career, and had one happenstance meeting. The book is a tribute to Duse's life and work, but more importantly to her spirit. Le Gallienne writes of Duse:
"It was from St. Juliana of Norwich that Duse learned one of her favourite phrases--which I heard her use many times, and with which she often ended a letter or a telegram: 'Tout sera bien'--or, as Dame Juiliana put it: 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. One day, when Duse was asking me about my school days in Paris, she mentioned the name of Fenelon, and wanted to know if I knew his work. She told me how much she loved his simplicity and sanity--two qualities which always appealed to her strongly. I vaguely remembered having studied excerpts from his Oeuvres Spirituelles, but they had made very little impression on me. 'You should read him again,' Duse said, 'he is good and gentle.' It was many years before I obeyed her. I understand now that he must have brought her much comfort. He had a profound and compassionate knowledge of the human heart. He never judged or condemned, though he was always honest. He believed that each individual has the power to rehabilitate himself through faith and right-thinking. The advice he gave to his spiritual children was challenging and bracing.
'Go forward--always forward; go forward without stopping and without glancing back.'
Duse would have appreciated that.
Over and over again he warns of the danger of constant self-reproach, of overscrupulous introspection. This danger Duse understood only too well.
'You must stop being overanxious; stop continually dwelling on your past; go forward!'
And, in a famous passage, Fenelon wrote:
'All our faults have their uses. There is nothing humble in discouragement; on the contrary, it is the sign of a vexed, despairing, cowardly ego; nothing could be worse. If we stumble, even if we fall, our one thought should be to pick ourselves up again and continue on our path.'
...Duse believed with Fenelon that self-rehabilitation must be accomplished in private, and alone."As I have been routing my journey of self help and rehabilitation, I have often found consolation in the words,
"All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."Reading Eben Alexander's book only reinforced this belief for me. If love truly prevails, if evil is present, but only to challenge our free will which in turn leads to growth, and if this growth is meant for strange and beautiful things--for us to become who we are truly meant to be: a wise person I love and know recently stated it as the mere yet ever feeling "fingertip on the hand of God," then what have I to fear? What have I to doubt in this earth bound life and in this new year?
I understand this now on a deep, rich, cosmic level: I--the part of me that is part of the 'I Am,' or God, or whomever or whatever you may call it,-- is absolutely whole and healthy and good. Therefore, I must keep forward movement onward, working my way back to the entirety of the 'I Am.'
What a relief to know that if we keep moving forward, and learn from our faults, we are rewarded by moving toward something good, and whole!
I feel a rejuvenated sense of pride and duty both to myself and others to continue to walk proudly with love and compassion in my heart. That, my friends, is what propels us forward through life. It lifts us up and buoys others, and as I have stated before, we must love inwards first to take our love outside ourselves eventually.
I am looking forward to 2013 with more hope than I have looked forward to any other new year perhaps in my whole life.
One of my resolutions for this new year is to share my writing with people other than myself and my ever supportive boyfriend. I leave you with this poem I penned myself. I hope you take it to heart.
Happy New Year...
The Part of You That Is With The AngelsThe part of you that is with the angels,
Is larger than you know.
The fragments of you that fear,
are surrounded by angelic light,
The slivers of self doubt,
Are wrapped in downy wings,
The shards that harbor anger,
Are cooled and dulled by
Songs of homecoming,
The pieces of you that feel
separate,
Could not be part of a
greater or more complete
Whole.
You are not alone.
You never have been,
Nor never will.
