The Wheel Spins On

A new cycle has begun. A mere 30 days from the Winter Solstice, we have already gained 27 minutes and 34 seconds of daylight.

We know what will follow…days steadily lengthening, leaf and bud bursting forth, young pronghorn and fawn careening about on spindly legs. Farmers will once again plant and then harvest their fields, bringing the Earth’s sweet bounty to market. The scent of roasting chiles will be next, giving way to the clean, cold bite of autumn air.

Much will happen for us in the next 12 months, both personally and worldwide. There will be joy and there will be heartbreak. And 2018 will come to a close, as all the years before have done. Beginnings lead not just to fullness, but to endings as well. Birth begets death. Seed becomes blossom and fruit, which then offer themselves as seed for the next cycle. 

This temporal reality has been likened to the revolutions of a great wheel.  On the rim of that wheel, things rise into existence, grow to fruition, and are released back into the unknown as the wheel spins on. This can be challenging for us, particularly if we’re unduly attached to keeping things as we’d like them to be or are frightened of what they might become. How are we to cope with the rising up and falling away of all things?

By moving to the hub. God has been described as the stillness at the center of it all. In the metaphor we’re working with here, the hub is the resting place of the eternal. Or perhaps the hub is our resting place, the spot where we can most easily perceive that which endures, and thus find our way back into harmony with it.

It is the nature of wheels to turn. And it is the nature of human beings to have preferences, to want the wheel to pause where we’re happiest or spin as we’d like. There’s nothing wrong with this. Working with our inclinations and using our will to consciously create our lives is a vital part of the human experience. 

But it’s also important to learn to return to the hub. Rather than flapping in the breeze as we clutch rim or spoke of an ever~revolving wheel, we do well to find our way to center. And so we pray, meditate, read sacred texts, immerse ourselves in nature, or engage in any number of other ways to the same end. As Rumi famously put it, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

So we kneel, regularly and often, kissing that center ground. And in the process, we learn to find our way back home, again and again…as the wheel spins forever round.

Lotsa love,

Leia