As we enter this season of rebirth, we naturally grow more attentive to what we may want to cultivate and grow. With this in mind, I recently read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a collection of the most common regrets of the dying, written by a palliative nurse. It’s not surprising to see what made the list, as they are all things that touch each of our lives as we struggle to pay attention to and make time for things that we truly love.

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I had let myself be happier.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I spent more time with friends.”
“I wish I had the courage to express my true feelings.”

So while we imagine how to ‘rebirth’ ourselves — how to clean up our act, how to renew, how to cultivate true and meaningful abundance in our lives — remember the words of those as they were parting: they had wished, of all things, for more laughter, friends, family, and the ability to be our true selves. Let us find true abundance here.

~Jillian Pransky

wherever we are in this life cycle of birth and death, may we reach deep enough to bypass the wrangling, the ‘not good enough’…..the shoulds……listen instead for the joy, the pure beauty of what calls us home…..

The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism. Life is a desperate struggle to be in fact that which we are in design.
~Ortega Y. Gassett

as the loon calls

The flowers will bloom forever,
the birds will sing their eternal song,
the moment we enter the garden,
You and I.

~Rumi