Just One Day

“The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, ‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’ Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.” – Pema Chödrön

“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair”

~Khalil Gibran

Watching the sunrise with orange tinting the sky over the Blue Ridge Mountains from my bedroom window, where I sit warm beneath a comforter, I realize that sunrises are more significant than they used to be. More beautiful and precious. The sound of geese flying overhead now contribute their presence. I smile.

Living in California for most of my life, on the West coast of the U.S. and by the Pacific Ocean, the sunsets were what drew people out to gather on the top of the cliff where ocean waves crashed below. It was a ritual of silent celebration of the day ending in such a way.

Now it is the sunrises on the East side of the country that take my attention and place me in awe. Perhaps they are more important to me now, or have more meaning as an elder. It now means I have awoken to another embodied day to explore.

What a gift recognizing that all I have right now is this one day before me. More to the point, I only have this moment in which I am joyfully witnessing the sun rise over the mountain top, constantly relating with sky, mountains, and clouds in a dance of color and light.

Our species seems to crave “certainty” and “security” spending an inordinate amount of time trying to create it. Yet isn’t it the greatest cosmic joke that there is never any to be had. There was a moment a short time ago when I felt so “stuck” in old patterns of being that all I wanted to do was launch myself into a new adventure or a new environment. Running away from what could not be run away from. Myself and the available ever shifting moment.

We continually experience endings and beginnings, birth and death, illness and health, regeneration and disintegration. Everything shifting and changing in each moment within and without.

There is no “stuck place” we can hide even though we desperately wish at times to slow everything down yearning to escape into somewhere secure, not shifting so much and so often. Yet it is beyond our personal power to stop this on going dance of life. Nor would we really want to.

Everything constantly changes as nature shows us right before our eyes. The seasons, one following another are one simple example of this essential truth of impermanence and constant change.

I question why we celebrate a “New” human contrived calendar year when all is fresh every day, ripe with possibility, opportunity, beauty and yes at times great pain and suffering. It sometimes takes me by surprise that anything rigidly adhered to or structured too much creates a backlash of resistance within me.

Isn’t it our time as an elder to be free of that and live life as an improvisation?

Will we allow ourselves to be pulled back into what we perceive as “comfort and security” that beckons us with enticing illusions of secure sameness in our well rehearsed patterns. Hiding our light from others – but more importantly from ourselves.

Or shall we recognize that there are only a continuous series of unfolding moments to be explored, breathed into, celebrated and lived gratefully. The Navajo way…..

‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’

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Gaye Abbott, Wildly Free Elder, 12/31/24