Season’s Greetings Everyone!

One of my favorite projects at this time of the year is making jam, which I give to neighbors and friends each Christmas. In July, we go early in the morning cool, winding down our back roads to the berry fields of a local farmer and pick heaping baskets of sweet strawberries to put in the freezer in anticipation of this winter habitude. There is something magical for me about making jam on a blustery December afternoon.

Inevitably, out of this practice, I wind up with a wonderful Speaker Material “Conversation”. This year’s discussions were about how our repeated actions as those ritualized activities we participate in, trigger their own specific emotional colourations to become "traditions of the heart". Such activities are an invisibly potent psychic-spiritual observance between our Self-and-self as evocative symbolism bound into emotional habit; a system of outward routine bound to inward routine that confirms life's meanings and values to authenticate our Self-to-self identity.

Our outward public traditions speak our personal language of interior essence and involvement, translating and transforming, transacting, and transcribing, Self-to-self; recording and recalling, re-minding and re-lighting the truths of our reality of creative nature; repeating motion and memory in a dance of heart and mind to reflect our nature of creativity - our power-through-choice.

Whatever our personal observances, they tell our own story, woven through time and spun into our experiences of ourselves in relationship to our Selves, both individually and collectively. This out-flowing of our inward essence is a spiritual effusion that brings meaning to our celebrations; and as always, the root of our choices decides the actual experiences that speak our reality – and the reality that speaks our experiences – self-to-Self and Self-to-self as the nature of our Being.

Too often, our traditions, rituals, customs, conventions, habits, and routines become entrenched activities (both inward and outward) without regard for the personally emotional aspects of these repetitive actions; until what we are doing becomes disconnected from why we are doing it. When we lose our sense of self-to-Self reason-to-action/activity, we can end up with practices that are false to our own beliefs, dreams, wishes, hopes, and efforts – contradictory to our own creative aims and distortive of the truths of our holistic experiences. To recognize how our participation is a choice that reflects our inward interactions into our outward interactions, helps us grow ourselves into enlightened creators through our own grand power to instill meaning, and share value.

We can make decisions that speak our own unique truths, creating beyond only the circles prescribed by others, past those conceptual patterns established, dictated, determined solely by others choices, needs and visions. In fact, in Speaker Material, we discover that such choosing is our own responsibility to ourselves if we want to live lives of enlightenment, truth and respect for ourselves. To infuse our personal truths into our traditions and rituals is to choose-to-create out of love and the responsibility we each have for fostering that ideal into our reality. This is to link ourselves to our own reality through repeated experience, as the enriched expression of our beliefs brought to life through the power of our actions/activities; this is to actualize our ideals.

We cannot command/demand change from others, for like ourselves, change is a natural product that evolves through Self-to-self development as the tandem effort to first seek and finally find our intrinsic power of creative Self-hood. We may not always like this bit of truth, but that does not make it less true. To seek, from the inside out, the knowledge of peace, love and authenticity, is to build our reality knowledge-fully formulated from these values. Then, our celebrations truly become traditions of the heart.

Individually and collectively, our ability to choose is the true meaning of our power, and our power to responsibly create from our inward learning demonstrates the meaning of life. As we participate in all that this season means within every culture, every family, and every Self, my wish is that we each celebrate the traditions of our hearts.


Happy New Year!

Spinfo