“It is the first mild day of March.  Each minute sweeter than before…There is a blessing in the air.     ~William Wordsworth~

Guess what?

As I knock on my wooden desk, I have to tell you that the last three days have been sunny and glorious. The snow is slowly melting and the birds are starting to sing.

Dare I say, winter is on the threshold of bidding me goodbye?

This a picture from our deck this past weekend

This past weekend,  I donned my country sweater. The one my step dad Bud used to wear with the brown, wooden buttons and pictures of horses in the knit. It’s too big for me, but I like it. I smell old spice when I wear it and feel him walking next to me. It reminds me of a simpler time, when we lived as a family together in Creston, in our big heritage house up on the hill. In spring, shovel in hand, he used to head out to the garden and double dig the well rotted horse manure he had dumped on it in the fall. I would wave goodbye, leather bridle over my shoulder, heading out to the fields where our horses were boarded. As I rode “Blondie,” my big Palomino horse,  I would sing at the top of my lungs, John Denver’s song, “Country Roads,” and Blondie’s long ears would flicker back and forth and she would step out alert and bright.

With these memories floating through my brain, and Bud by my side, I headed out to clean the chicken coop. To me, that’s the first rites of spring. Weird, but I like to do it. The very first thing I did was unplugged their heat lamp and their water font. I wrapped up the electric cord and dropped it into my husband’s work bench drawer with a determined plop and went back to the coop, clomping in my black winter boots.

As I started to scoop out the old wood shavings, I laughed watching our four hens tip toe across the frozen, still snow covered tundra of our back yard. They gratefully hopped up onto the exposed dirt of the garden.  The little kids came out to join us and gleefully started bouncing on the trampoline, which was no longer weighed down by a pile of snow. They started taking turns having rolling and crazy jumping contests, while the sun glinted off their shiny heads. As the kid’s laughed, I could hear the chickens happily “pluck, plucking,” while they gleefully scratched in the quickly thawing earth.

In this atmosphere,  the seeds for this post  started to germinate.

You may remember me mentioning in a few of my past posts how over and done I was with winter. It was only after one of our last snow falls that I finally conceded, dug deeper under my winter comforter, allowing the cold season to follow it’s natural course, without further grumbling on my part. It’s not like it was going to leave any faster, and being depressed  was making me miserable.

And so I surrendered.

Surrender is a funny thing. You’d think once you wave your white flag and give up, that what you want most of all moves farther away from you and yet, the reverse is true.

William brought home this little snow man on Friday. I’m thinking it’s the last winter craft that will be coming home

I learned this lesson early in my adult life, although I didn’t start putting it into conscious practice until I was over forty. I’ll never forget falling in love in my early twenties with someone who I thought I could easily spend the rest of my life with. Rob and I dated the fall and winter when I turned twenty one. I was enamored with  his intellect, humour, and his kindness. One of my last memories I have with him, was skiing at Lake Louise in the Rockies. It had been a blissful day, gliding down the runs, but by the end, every muscle in my body screamed for a hot bath. As we were driving home though, it started to snow heavily and when we spotted a car pulled over with it’s hood up, instead of passing like everyone else, Rob pulled his truck over, got out and went to help the driver. I don’t remember what he ended up doing; something mechanical. He liked solving mechanical problems. It wasn’t long though, before he jumped back into the truck with a smile on his face.  In that moment I fell deeper in love with him.

A long term relationship was not to be however and we broke up. The next thing I heard, he was dating a classmate back in my old hometown. The year after they were married. I was devastated after we broke up and my heart was hurting. As spring unfolded though, and the beauty of the season with it, I decided to swear off men, letting go of any thoughts that love was in my future. I planned to make a good life for myself. I had a job I loved, a comfortable place to live and friends who were good companions. I didn’t need men in my life.

There is some miracle that flies out into the great Universe when we let go. It’s like a bird, light and peaceful, drifting higher and higher until you can no longer see it in the sky. And when you have forgotten all about it, when you have started to laugh again, that bird gently finds it’s way back to you, settles on your shoulder, and when you glance at it, you notice it’s feathers are dusted with grace and glisten with a golden orb of hope.

After my relationship with Rob was over, my best and dear friend Lynne and I joined the Calgary Ski club. While spring is maybe not the best time to join a ski club, that group organized fun events all year long. The  Friday night socials were a highlight, with something fun being planned every week. Of course, at the club there was great music, the drinks were cheap and the evenings were spent laughing with friends. It was there, when I was decidedly single, and happily proclaiming my status, that I met my future husband, David.

I was not in the least bit interested in getting involved with another man.  He had other plans though and my mom’s words, “you can never have too many friends,” rang in my ears. Slowly we got to know each other. He became a friend and eventually, he wooed me back into the idea that love was worth it. He was the man that I was meant to be with for this lifetime. The rest is history, as they say.

The point of that little story was to illustrate how the law of attraction works in our life. When we want something so bad, no amount of pushing and pulling will ever bring it closer. It’s not until we let go and surrender that a void occurs, allowing what is really meant for us to move into our life.

And as this quote below illustrates, the law of attraction and the wisdom in surrendering, has been recognized for centuries.

“Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.

All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your nature so specially fits you for–that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It will surely come to you.

Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference.

Therefore do not begin that game at all.”

~English Poet, Edward Carpenter~(1844-1929)

And so, Cheryl married Rob and together they had four children. They were married for 32 years until he sadly died of cancer in 2014.  I will never forget his smile or his kind heart.

In my forties, the art of surrender finally came home to me in a conscious way. David and I had been trying so hard to have our fifth baby, one that I thought would complete our family, not knowing something even bigger was destined for our family.  It took a long time to get pregnant. Then finally, we did and I was jubilant.  All too soon, we discovered that our “soulbaby’s” heart beat had stopped.  I eventually miscarried  at the end of the first trimester. That winter was full of pain and grief. As I let go of the idea of ever having any more children, with it came a moment of grace. The following Spring, as the world was waking up once again to the warming earth, and me with it, I got pregnant again. Our daughter, Grace Elizabeth, was born just after I turned forty three, the following December. I often call her my surrender baby.

Even after her birth though, and the true understanding of the power of letting go washed over me, I sometimes get caught up in the act of pushing life, only to remember that no amount of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands will bring what I want into my life. All I need to do is open my hands, palm side up and offer myself up to the great good of the Whole.

And once again, the early days of spring are almost here. Was it me finally surrendering to winter that made it appear?

Is there something you desire more than anything right now? Are you working hard to create a life or bring something into your world? Stop and think about how you are trying to manifest your dream and surrender your desire. MOVE INTO THE FLOW OF ALLOWING and watch it whoosh into your life. (often it comes even better than anything you could EVER dream)

A great mantra that I have used many times since Grace’s birth is “Let go and let God.”

When we let go, and live in a state of gratitude and appreciation, good things always flow our way.

And that finally brings me to my final story and a lesson in making almond milk.

On the weekend, as I started working outside, close to Mother Earth, cleaning the coop, picking up crinkled and dry leaves and digging them into the garden, sweeping up the sidewalks and drive way, I started to get frustrated. I have so much I want to do to create a richer, more sustainable life for myself and my family.  At times, it feels like I’m walking a tight rope, holding all the things I want to implement into our lives, while below is a  consumer driven society that beckons us to live a different way than our heart’s calling. I work hard at not falling.

I came inside the kitchen fuming over my thoughts and exhaled them all over my oldest son, who was making a pot of tea. Now Clark, as you may know, has a Science degree. An Earth and Environmental science degree to be exact, so he gets where I’m coming from. He cares about our planet But he’s also been marinaded in the art of surrender and allowing for years.

He’s been exposed to quotes like the following one by Rumi, on our large kitchen chalk board; and of course we have had many great philosophical discussions on the merits of a soul driven life.

Although he comes from a Science base belief system, he understands the art of surrender.  At times, I think he’s even perfected it. A demonstration of such is recently, it was me  not him, who was wringing her hands, wondering if he would get into law school next fall. He sent off his applications and then calmly went about his life, doing things that made him happy.  Spending time with his friends, working out at the gym and making a difference at our local Science Centre. So the other day, I should not have been surprised, when he made an astute observations and brought me up cold. I was talking a mad streak about some of my zero waste ideas,  while pouring a cup of raw almonds into a large canning jar and filling it with water. I set the jar on the counter to soak and continued my frustrated vent with him.  He listened to all my thoughts and when I took a breath and was silent for a moment he finally said…..

“Mom, are you making almond milk?” I glanced over at the canning jar and said, “Yeah?” “Well, mom,”  he said, “maybe you can’t solve the big environmental issues on the earth, but it’s the little things you do each day that make a difference; like making almond milk from scratch.”

“Hmmm, ”  I said and smiled.

I rinsed the soaked almonds this morning and made almond milk. While doing so I remembered something I often tell my oldest daughter but I forget to do so myself;

I remembered to, “breathe, relax, trust and enjoy,” and made a note to myself to talk with David about my idea to cancel our weekly garbage pick up. Stay tuned on how the process of surrendering THAT, goes in our life.

And if you’d like to stop buying almond milk from the store, and take little steps with me towards living a more sustainable life, then come on into my kitchen and let’s make some almond milk. You can make it as creamy as you like, you can even add a  vanilla bean or any flavouring you like. The best part is you don’t have to drive to the store to get your almond milk. You save fuel, and also the packaging that is used for the almond milk. If you are able to buy your almonds in bulk, using your own jar, or reusable bag, all the better.

Ready to surrender?

Let’s go and make some almond milk….it’s ALL GOOD!

Homemade Almond Milk

Instructions

1. Add your soaked raw almonds, water, salt and any additional options into a high speed blender until creamy and smooth. Keep it running and milk the almonds for 1 to 2 minutes.