Get Outside

We’ve written about Spring before but perhaps never before has the message of renewal and rebirth seemed so relevant as so many of us emerge from our Covid induced winter that actually roots back to last spring. From self quarantining to self medicating, self studying and soul searching, for many it’s become more about self sustaining than self soaring. Days blended, many of us woke up while others buried their heads and wherever you found yourself on that spectrum it seemed to suck up so much of our energy to do – getting involved, staying on the sidelines, trying to understand both sides and to be on the right one, checkin in or trying to check out. So here we are, one year after “shutting down” and it couldn’t be any more appropriate that it aligns with the start of Spring.

While we’re not all the way back – and as big fans of Satya/truth/non-lying, one of the niyamas/non-restraints Patanjali calls out in the Yoga Sutras, we aren’t under any false pretense or illusion that the path ahead is anything but a long one – we also recognize that we need to wake up from our long sumber-hibernation and muster up the energy to be out in the world, in whatever way we are most comfortable with.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, “we loiter in winter while it is already Spring.” It’s time to spring ahead, friends, to get outside– on a physical level, to get to the outdoors – there is so much out there to inspire and awe us if we get outside with eyes wide open- on a mental level, to get outside of patterns that may have been set over the past year, years, decades, a lifetime. When we can break out of patterns, get outside of our comfort zone, get outside of everything we know – or think we know, get outside of whatever expectation we’ve set for ourselves and others, we are no longer loitering in winter, we are truly living in the now of Spring.