Resolutions?

Happy New Year, friends of the Wild Goose Hermitage.  If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, it is chock-a-block full of advice on making New Year's resolutions -- do it, don't do it, commit to your health, evaluate old relationships, lose weight & exercise, take a class, meditate more...  all sorts of advice that may or may not work for any one in particular.

Here's what I intend for 2016 at the hermitage.  More.  Deeper.  Slower.  More spacious.  Nothing all that radically different from the life we have already established here, just more of it.  I learned from my efforts in Advent that switching things up because a random point in time had been reached didn't work.  If life in the hermitage has meaning, it is that steadiness and space and depth are going to be the means by which my spiritual life and ministry are nourished.

This is not to say that others should not make resolutions.  Far from it.  I can easily imagine folk for whom this moment, this turn of the year, is a significant time, a chance to embrace something new and life-giving.  If that is true for you, then by all means follow that intuition; let it guide you wherever you are meant to be.

My resolve, however, will be to deepen my life in the Spirit here in place.  To embrace the practice of prayer by stopping in the prayer corner more often.  To rest in meditation by remembering to bring myself to my cushion.  To bring attention to each breath as a gift of God for awakening, and to dedicate my practice to the alleviation of suffering of all sentient beings.

Blessings in the New Year, and every day.