The Perpetual Paradox of Becoming
A Turn of the Year Musing - One Inch Photos & In Case You Missed It - The 2025 The Gathering of Spirits Gift Calendar & Music Always Music
Photo by Carrie Newcomer- One Inch Photos
“Like snow blown before a lighted window, we pass in and out of light and shadow on the journey between now and forever. “It all happened so quickly,” we say and yet there were hundreds of eternities that opened in the eye-blink of days of the year just past. In my end is my beginning—the perpetual paradox of becoming - Marv and Nancy Hiles (The Almanac of the Soul)
Here at the turn of the year, I find myself quite drawn to Marv and Nancy Hiles idea of “the perpetual paradox of becoming.” At midnight on December 31st we turned the calendar page and began referring to 2024 as “last year”. We think of New Year’s Day as a kind of hard stop when one thing ends and another thing begins, but it often takes me a few weeks to remember the shift has happened, requiring me to cross out or erase the date i’ve written on a check or form and replace it with the newly minted correct year. Having a way to mark time is useful and human beings have been doing it for a long time. Thresholds are important. But I’ve often wondered how the passing of a single day can shift our sense of reality so dramatically. The day before my fifth birthday I’d lived 1,824 days, the next day I’d lived 1,825 days. I wasn’t all that different on the inside or outside, but by blowing out five instead of four birthday candles, I was now eligible by the laws of Indiana to begin kindergarten. On December 31 2024 I’d been pondering the mysteries and meanings of this life for 24,336 days. On January 1st… well, I was still pondering. We carry with us countless eternities, moments that came and went in the course of a hour, a day or year. Our lives and experiences are expansive in that way, filled to the brim with openings and closings. The world would measure my life in last year or next year, but my real life is actually made up countless “nows” and the next moment in my own becoming.
In the winter there is a slowing of time. The woods and pond seem so perfectly content with resting. At 24,341 days I find myself sensing more deeply that there are less days ahead of me than behind, and there is something about that realization that makes a part of me whisper, “hurry hurry, before the walled city falls, before the last drop is gone, before you miss whatever it was you came to do or be or even notice.” But another part of me, the wiser part, is looking at a circle around me as I write this post —my dog Ella, snoozing beside me on the couch, which is next to Robert snoozing in the big leather overstuffed chair, which is next to our emergency back-up dog, Lily, who is snoozing in front of the Christmas tree that we will take down tomorrow - but for tonight is glowing and covered with a hundred bird ornaments collected over the many days of my life. The wiser part of me says, “There is no reason to hurry, no need to chase anything, because everything is right here in this moment.” I am here and I am becoming, as I have always been.
There are too many endings to count and too many beginnings to even hold. We are right here as we are, and yet we are always in the process of transformation. And yes, it is a paradox, a mystery and somehow an ever present gift.
And so, in this particular January, when the world seems to be moving so quickly from one concern to the next, when the world is nudging “hurry hurry”, I am remembering to be here in the “now” of things, sensing the countless eternities in the cycle of seasons where everything begins and ends and becomes and transforms and starts all over again.
Practice
Make yourself a cup of tea. Settle into a chair and drink it slowly without “doing” anything else but appreciating the tea…the taste of it, the warmth of it, the way the scent lifts into the air around you. Sip it slowly without rushing, closing your eyes sometimes. When you’re eyes are open notice the light in the room, the sounds of your home, the quality of the quietness if it is quiet. When you have finished your tea, write a three line Haiku about the experience.
Question:
What did you notice when you sipped your tea slowly that you might have missed if you drank it quickly? Did something in the moment of drinking tea expand? Did you sense the opening and closing of that moment more deeply? If you wrote a haiku, feel free to share it.
Music Always Music
This Song is called “The Clean Edge of Change”. I’ve come to believe that the only thing in life that doesn’t change is that things are pretty much going to change. It felt like the right song for the paradox of perpetual becoming. The song was recorded on my album The Geography of Light. You can listen to the full album on Spotify Here.
In case you missed The Gathering of Spirits Calendar last week…
The Gift of Marking The Moment
Last year I created a calendar for everyone using photos from my “one inch photos” and excerpts from my posts and conversations with you through the year. I decided to continue the idea and created a new The Gathering of Spirits Calendar for 2025.
You can print it out and staple it at the top to create a year long calendar. I’ve created spaces for you to jot down notes or quotes or thoughts to yourself each month.
My suggestion is to not use this calendar for appointments or practical matters.
But instead, use this calendar in some creative way to mark moments, record wonder, make a note of gratitude, or celebrate when the world surprised you.
Next year….maybe we’ll all compare notes :-)
Download below!
One Inch Photos
I am reminded of a story about a wooden boat that gets a part replaced each day with a different but identically sized part, until every part has been replaced. The question of the story is whether it becomes a new boat, and if so, at what point did it become new. And then, applying the question to ourselves. Our physical bodies are ever changing, and our minds are always different, moment to moment, as we see a flower or think a new thought.
A Haiku from me to you…
In my beginning
is my end gain in wisdom.
This prompted my birth.
Birth, not physical
but born of understanding
through experience.
Thought so newly formed
will offer this end result:
Regeneration.
It does seem distant
in our ever finite minds
to connect the two.
When we choose to hear
and settle ourselves with peace
do we realize birth.
Accept both forces:
beginning and end are one.
Embrace the process.
❤️…ireneOlds