May 25, 2021
Magnificent Magnolia Morning
By Amba Gale
Each morning, before I go to my office, in my morning practice of drinking tea, and reading poetry, and writing, with an intention to “get out of my head” and “get out of my plans” and move into the natural world “out here,” something new clicks for me. The morning, noticing the bright red rhododendron blossoming near the greening of the leaves, and the waning petals of my magnolia tree, the poem, “Magnificent Magnolia Morning” came my way, opening the territory for me to reflect upon the impermanence of all things. Even though we often avoid it, or deny it, or resist, the Law of Impermanence, were we to accept it, embrace it, allows us to be open to surprises, open to wonder, open to new possibility, to new life.
As a commitment to ever growing, ever deepening my relationship with my Self, others, and the natural world, I ask myself to attune to the small deaths that are waiting to happen, that are calling to me to notice, each day. I invite you to do the same. It can be a death of a way of being, a way of relating, a way of knowing, or a physical letting go of someone or something has been precious in your life, or a way of thinking that once, perhaps, was empowering to you, but now no longer is. It could be a death of a story, about yourself, or another, that you have held on to too tightly, or some judgment or opinion that has now confined you into something small, or a habit, or set routine, or a rigid idea of who you or who someone else is.
I know that was the case for me, when I saw, two summers ago, the absolute necessity of letting go of a certain way I held my daughter, keeping our relationship small. Doing the work I needed to do to shift that relationship led me into the poems that became my book, Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections, which has since become a course, empowering many. Every time, now, I see that it is time for something to die, I let it “drop to the ground, making rich the soil” as this morning’s poem says. Only then do I find myself OPEN to the new births that can now come my way, as, once again, this morning, I found myself in a new depth of Belonging.
Eckhart Tolle, one of my most favorite authors, who wrote Power of Now, and The Good Earth, says “The Secret of life is to ‘die before you die.’”
He also tells us, “Death is a stripping away of all that is not you.”
What is the “not you” that it is now time to “strip away?”
Magnificent Magnolia Morning
By Amba Gale
Now come the rhodies,
ripe with red
and readiness
singing Spring,
while my greening magnolia
tree greets
the sea.
Magnificent each morning
in her pink green dress
changing each day.
No morn is like the last.
My own garden lets me know:
Not only is change inevitable
Not only do our little deaths
give way to new births
Not only if we give our focused
attention, we will have
the gift of amazement.
Not only do the ever
flowering blossoms
drop to the ground
making rich the soil
with their pink and blue petals.
But I, too, in my morning reveries
Belong,
am being breathed open myself
by the breath of the divine.
