Besides the miraculous nature of new birth in general (not to mention the story of Christmas), what is giving birth in you right now?
As a family, pregnancy is on our minds right now, as 2023 brought a new one to it and 2024 is scheduled to do the same.
In some way, we all have a kind of pregnancy going on with us. Perhaps, it is simply whether we realize it or not.
Do we feel expanded by the lead-up and then experience of Christmas this year? While not everyone does (some for me haven't felt that way), I do this year. Some of that has to do with, as expected, all that happened in 2023. Some has to do with the richness and connection we experienced as a family and friends this last week. Some of it has to do with what we already know is coming in the new year — both challenges and opportunities.
When we are expanded, there is usually some resulting and new residual space. Maybe the question we have is something along the lines of what we fill it with. More of the same? Something new? What is it about the emptiness that often trails expansion in lives that feels uncomfortable, but that also is essentially a new opportunity? One that gives us room to sense the more than we actually do want after all.
Expansion often creates the unsettling effect that we actually have more to do than we thought we did. Perhaps, we want to be something different...more of who we really are. Do we take specific steps towards that, uncertain as we may be about what we're actually discovering, or do we just fill it all back in and slowly collapse back into the predictability we more often prefer.
About this time in our cultural cycles, we either feel inspired or cynical about the annual pep-talks the possibilities a new year brings. Perhaps, this is because we embrace them mostly in our heads.
But, pregnancy (literal or metaphorical) is not a head-thing, as much as it is an embodied thing...a terrifying and exhilarating encounter with new life in whatever forms we experience it. It requires a unique kind of attention from us. It makes us more alive.
Unknowing isn’t ignorance; it’s recognizing a world flush with wonderment and puzzle and mystery.
-- Tom Lutz
