Now is the Time

I walked out this morning, a walking pole in one hand and a small bag of household waste in the other. It's garbage day today.

All around me was white. The snow was white and the sky was exactly the same colour. The trees and bushes were clothed in white. Only tree trunks and the larger branches gave my eyes a tracing of black-brown to follow. The tracks of deer were grey-white shadows in the snow. The mass of Sutton Mountain, visible from the bottom of my driveway, was all white; even the tree trunks there were invisible under the snow. The mountain seemed to shine, as if with some inner light, from its height. The silence was almost total in the world around my house. The neighbour's barking dog sounded muffled by snow and distance. There were no passing cars. The road was as white as all else. It all seemed absolutely perfect to me.

Since Monday, there has been an almost indescribable peace within me. It is as if I had been dipped in some sensory accompaniment to the whiteness that surrounds me. My consciousness is as softly undisturbed as the blessed snow that lies over rocks and earth outside.

It is not that I have not had occasion to feel less than that peace. As if to plumb its depths, I managed to break my favourite wine glass - an exquisite hand-blown glass of a particularly lovely blue colour. I had found it by chance in a Goodwill store, a charity shop, for those not from the United States. It wasn't valuable in monetary terms, but I treasured it as a great find and a lovely glass and used it every day, not just for wine, but for water and fruit juice as well. I broke it and stared at the sharp fragments and the splattered liquid that it had held and felt no regret, no trouble, no sense of loss. I felt that all is perfect at being what it is in the moment. I valued its presence in my life, celebrated my enjoyment of it for so long as I had it whole and then let it go completely.

It is a feeling of complete acceptance that is within me. It is filling me completely, so that I am in love with everything that surrounds me. I can't seem to not be in love at the moment.  I can't seem to not be in complete acceptance. I'm not trying very hard to leave this peace behind. I have sought it, over many years. Now, it seems to have taken residence within me.

It feels within me like the energy that I have felt when I have called to Yeshua ben Joseph to come to me. It feels like a bit of divinity now shining within my being, permeating my consciousness as the snow outside lies everywhere, permeates all of the landscape, covers all in its quiet whiteness. This peace, this love, this acceptance suffuses all that I AM.

It will take me some time to become familiar with it, I suspect. It will take me some time to understand how I am who I am within the peace which now fills me. It will take me some time to understand how I can express it in the world around me. I trust this process. I trust it as I trust my own breath to bring oxygen into my lungs and blood and body.

I remember exactly when it came. It was on Sunday evening. I looked into the mirror, met my own gaze for an instant, and said, "It's time. It's time now." And I felt it. I felt a sense of emergence. I felt an emergence into something. I didn't know what it was, but I trusted.

And it has been there ever since. It feels like coming out of the most wonderful yoga class, meditation session, or massage, but it doesn't go away over time. It doesn't fade or recede. It remains as a potent presence of unutterable peace within me.

I'll keep you posted. And I know, as surely as I feel this potent peace within me, that whatever you are choosing for yourself now, whatever you are choosing to experience within yourself, now is the time that you can. Now is the time.