One Last Look at Abundance, My 2017 One Little Word

Hello and welcome to Spiritual Journey Thursday! On this, our final roundup for 2017, we are discussing our experiences with our One Little Words.

My word for 2017 has been ABUNDANCE. When I selected the word I could not have imagined what abundance was in store for me -- I didn't know we would get a lake house and travel to far-flung spaces and write so, so many words... I didn't know I'd spend so many hours poring over old letters and photographs, emptying drawers and filling up boxes to donate or give away... I didn't know the wide expanse of emotions I'd experience this year -- grief and joy and love and hope and despair ... what an overflowing year this has been!

It's interesting to me how one of the big things I've learned this year is about how little I need. And how much easier it is to enjoy my life when it is simple. Even something like getting dressed to go somewhere is a better experience when the closet isn't jammed up with so many someday-clothes. I like the simplicity that comes from having less, and how this opens me to the abundance of other things: nature, time with loved ones, my writing.

One of the lessons I find I must learn over and over again is my own worth -- I am enough. This year's focus on abundance, on trusting that I will --and have been-- so well cared for in my life, in spite of our because of hardships, has brought me peace and confidence. I AM enough. I am exactly where I need to be. It's the strangest thing how what seems like such a simple shift turns out ot be monumental in how I engage in my own life!

photo by Eric

Something I can always fall back on, something I constantly return to, is gratitude. How powerful to see -- and shape!-- one's life through a sense of abundance. All those pesky problems and worries shed themselves with no thorns to cling to. Life flows, like water, which brings us back to the lake, our lake house, how this thing we didn't plan for, couldn't have anticipated, has changed us in such profound ways! So much so that we've decided to move to the lake permanently. Why wait?

So, oddly, sitting in gratitude and abundance this year has helped me believe that I, we, deserve this abundance not just on the weekends, but all the time. And it is right there waiting for us. All we have to do is open ourselves to it.

Here's a poem from Linda Gregg's book THE SACRAMENTS OF DESIRE:

Singing Enough to Feel the Rain

by Linda Gregg

I am alone writing as quickly as I can,

dulled by being awake at four in the morning.

Between the past and future, without a life,

writing on the line I walk between death

and youth, between having and loss.

Passion and bravery absolutes, and I don't

have anything but the memory of Aphrodite's

elbow pushing up through the dirt, golden

with the sunlight on it. I am far from there

in a hurry not to miss the joining,

struggling to explain that this worse time

is important. It is just past autumn now

and the leaves are down, wet on the road.

Some of Her shoulder showed, but not enough

to tell whether She was facing my way.

Any of it is most of it, as any part

of Cezanne is almost all of Cezanne. Now

is so late in the world that there is silence.

Heart is as beautiful as ever. What can we

expect of a woman buried in the earth?

Most of it is enough. Some of it is almost

enough. Just as I am a body too, and if he

leans down over me there will be a world.

A train goes past making an incidental sound.

Something is nourished by the loss. An ending

and beginning at once. The world does not sing,

but we do. I sing to lessen the suffering,

thinking of the factory girl Hopkins said

lived a long time on the sacrament alone.
But I also sing to inhabit this abundance.

------------------

2018 Spiritual Journey Thursday Sign Up

Please sign up to host next year! Please leave your chosen date, blog url, and topic in comments. (If we are not yet email buddies, please send me an email: irene (at) irenelatham (dot) com so I can get in touch with you!)

January 4 - Margaret (choosing your One Little Word)
February 1 - Donna (the heart)
March 1 - Karen (music)
April 5 - Carol (poetry as spiritual practice)
May 3 - Violet (Special Days)
June 7 - Margaret (summer)
July 5 - Doraine
August 2 - Pat (aging and living with no regrets)
September 6 - Donna (commitment)
October 4 - Jan
November 1 - Ramona
December 6  - reflections on 2018 One Little Word with Irene at Live Your Poem
----------
Finally, please leave your link below!