Can you feel it? Change, I mean. It is like a diffuse yet discernible energy that is affecting every living thing right now in unimaginable ways. Have you ever considered how change is like a door? What do you think about when you think of doors? We think of entrances and exits or a shift or transition from one environment into another. Many, if not most, are afraid of change except when they can control it. But control, in the way we usually consider it, is an illusion. We are creatures, too, like the rest of creation, loved and sustained by our Creator. Sometimes we forget, though.
Sometimes, we can pay so much attention to the outer landscapes of life that we allow our inner landscapes to go to weeds, so to speak. Participating in a worshipping community is one part of tending our inner landscapes, as is learning to cultivate an inner stillness to allow a pause between thoughts. Practices like these help us transit the threshold of the door of change before us and enter into another, different environment with Peace, Hope, and Love. We may not present this way all of the time, but we drink from this well enough to make it a usual way of being.
As I consider the metaphorical doors of my life and the comings and goings of myself and others I love and have loved, I honor all of the related feelings of sorrow, pain, joy, and celebration in their entirety. Now I know that to be balanced in this life necessitates my learning to hold everything that I experience in honor of the present moment— where G-D IS. When we need and want Peace, Hope, and Love for ourselves, we remember to BE HERE NOW…where G-D is.
Because I am where I am at this point in time, I want to share with you a poem that I encountered as part of my recent meditations about doors. It was written by a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Katherine on the night before she was struck by an automobile. She departed her earthly life exactly one week later. The untitled poem was discovered by her mom in her room and was later given to a retreat leader for sharing with the wider world. So, here goes:
Untitled—
Look at me-
I’m walking through a door
My life is changing and it’s just perfect now
No more doors for me
They’re too hard to get through
I’m staying here where it’s safe-
No, child,
Those doors are a part of you
You can’t ignore them
Cause they’re there
You’ve got to go through them
Who knows what you’ll find
You’ve got to meet their trial
If you don’t, you won’t be what you should become
There are always gonna be doors and you
Can’t stop ’em from comin’
You’ve got to go through them to grow
It’s called change
Look at the wildflower; it changes all the time
always blossoming or closing up, sprouting or withering
You’re scared to go through those doors
Into the unknowing, “into change”
You don’t know what’s going to happen
You don’t know what change is going to bring
Listen to me
Go through those doors with hope
Go through those doors knowing change is the future
and you’re part of it
You don’t know what change is, that’s why
you’re scared
Change is the sun booming over the horizon
Scattering rays of hope to a new day
Change is a baby lamb meeting the world for its first time
Change is growing from a young child to a young woman
Change is beautiful; you will learn to love it
-Mary Katherine Lidle