Hi Friend,

"I really want to take your Origin Story Course," said a former student who loves learning with me this past week. "But I'm really worried I don't have enough time right now. I'm so busy! Maybe I’ll join the next time you offer it?"

Ahhhh. Right.

A note on the time commitment of this 10-week course: I suggest participants aim for 20 -30 minutes of writing 5 days a week. You might actually find that helps all sorts of other things in your life, too. Rituals - including writing rituals - can really help this whole scarcity of time thing.

Dip your toe into the sacred for a bit, and that to-do list can start to shape shift. Or at least you can, and that can change how you hold that to-do list at all. Maybe you just leave it at the door.

Annnnnd I get it.

The number of really cool courses, lectures, webinars, parties, dances, gatherings, etc. that I have not participated in because "I didn't have enough time." That ‘maybe later’ voice sometimes really does turn into a ‘yes’ a few months/years down the line. I’ve had some amazing students who plan to take a course with me 1-2 years in advance. And it works.

Sometimes, delaying is the best choice.

Sometimes I look back and think, man, that was a really special opportunity that didn't come back to me, and I wish I had taken it.

I don't know when I'm teaching the Origin Stories Class again.

I don't know what your future - or mine - holds.

Just recently, Krissy and I were at a gathering for Conscious Changemakers. We enjoyed it. We also got the dates wrong in our calendar and thought it ended earlier than it did. We ended up leaving early. Right before we left, after we said our goodbyes, I learned what the next session was. It was a topic I'm super interested in. I looked at her and said, can we stay for just one more hour? And she said, "Well, I'm done, I'm getting really tired, and so if you really want to stay, I'll go sit in the car." I made my decision in a few seconds: we would leave. That choice came easily: over several years, I've learned that, more often than not (but not always) tending to Krissy's "I'm done" moments (which regularly happen earlier than mine do) is usually beneficial not just for her but also for my overarching health and well-being. (And sometimes I stay later than she does.)

I also heard a voice saying - this is what life is like, too. There's always another thing. And then you die and that thing didn't happen. Choose. To choose life is to choose the ephemeral nature of existence.

Which illicit much bigger questions about choice and time and attention than just a particular course; questions that keep coming up in this time of choices …. and consequences.

This missive is coming out on the Saturday between, in the Christian tradition, Good Friday (when Jesus is crucified) and Easter Sunday (his resurrection). In many aspects of Christian tradition, it represents a time of quiet reflection and rest. Of course there is variety. In Mexico, they burn effigies of Judas. In the Philippines, it is called Black Saturday. Old-time Quakers don't celebrate it at all. They didn't celebrate Easter, either, believing that "Christ rises in our hearts every day" and to celebrate one day over another was denying the ongoing presence of the Light.

The liturgical quiet in this in-between space always reminds me of the space between the exhale and the inhale. between the death of one moment and the birth of another, there is a pause. It feels like it touches some of the Zen concepts of nothingness. A time between time. A time before and after time that is still in time.

A time we sometimes forget we have access to, at all.

It's helpful, in these times when most of my clients and students are experiencing a lot of pressure around time, to lean into the space in between. It's a brief space, yes. But it's always there. It keeps finding different ways of coming back.

And then....

What happens then?

The classic Christian story is a resurrection story, a story that is, as my friend Rev Katerina Gea says, as much about the stones in the cave (total divine feminine symbolism there) as about the people. The stones, afterall, are the first ones who experience the resurrection of Jesus, even if their experience isn’t discussed in the text. Did the stones sing to the body? Or were they all silent together, in a companionable kind of way?

Of course, we don't know if the resurrection happened. The first version of the Book of Mark, which is our earliest recorded Gospel, had no resurrection story attached to it. It was just - Jesus did all these things and then they caught him and crucified him and it really sucks. It ends with the cross.

Later, people added into the Gospel the story of resurrection.

Can you imagine what Christianity would have been if that had been the only recorded Gospel? No resurrection story. (The number of pastors who have told me never to leave people at the cross. They have to get to the resurrection. The whole point of Friday is Sunday! It's about the Celebration that Life Continues! )

They say that the first community, the ones who wrote the Gospel of Mark (yes, most scholars think the Gospels came out of community storytelling, not just individuals), were in pretty deep trauma after the destruction of the Temple by the Roman Empire. It was a hard, hard moment. That which they had spent generations building to help them survive the Empire (and to fulfill their own sense of rightness) was just - gone. It probably felt like it had all happened almost overnight. In that moment, they themselves did not experience a sense of resurrection. So the origin story they wrote about their own teacher (the origin story of Christianity is deeply tied to the connection between life and death) did not include a miraculous resurrection. Just the silence of the cross. I don't know if they saw that as depressing or not.

Maybe they were in a hurry and just didn't finish writing the final chapter.

I'm not trying to be morbid (ok, maybe just a little bit), but what is all this life for if we aren't facing these important questions: what's worth doing; what stories are worth telling?

Do you have enough time?

For what?

With whom?

No, probably not.

Yes, for sure.

Given the news (ex: millions of federal dollars going to dirty coal plants, after the industry has been actively phasing itself out for decades), I am not feeling we have enough time to address climate chaos. The climate futures don't look so pretty right now. But who knows, maybe this war against Iran will so destabilize the energy markets that by summer, we won't have much oil anywhere, and that will reduce carbon emissions??? I admit: this was not exactly the 'drawdown plan' I thought we were aiming for…

I do have enough time to … love.

To love this particular place. To practice loving my neighbor. To practice loving myself. To love my partner and friends and tree-friends and rivers. It's not that hard, really.

I have enough time to sing - though maybe not all the songs I want to sing.

I have enough time to share a few stories. To contribute something to this vast big work of storytelling that we pass down, one generation after another; sacred stories and origin stories and stories about time and stories about how we tell stories.

Such as, for example, how our current calendar system really can be seen to originate with a bunch of monks in the 800s trying to figure out their own liturgical calendar... all of which was centered around Easter. Here's an article I wrote about the Goddess of the Dawn and the Reckoning with Time. If you have time to read it, that is - its not one of my shorter pieces.

I hope you are giving yourself time to do what enriches you.

Maybe that includes working with us in some way - spiritual direction, storytelling, co-creations.

Maybe it's just reflecting on these kinds of big questions I like to ask.

I will keep raising them.

At least that's my hope.

Blessings on your choices, and on those moments in between….

- Sara Jolena