Tabula Rasa

A brand spanking new year. A blank slate. I remember in college first hearing the fancy phrase, "tabula rasa"----and the idea of a blank slate got a real name. Oh yeah, baby. Immediately, I loved it. I loved it and knew it was the way I preferred to live. How I like to see a movie (knowing nothing...awash in real time.) How I read a book. (I know some prefer a glance at the last page---I'm simply not one of them!) To me, blank slates are alive with delight, possibility. I think there's a little edge of excitement/danger there too, that I like. Truly not knowing creates a wild adventure. Again, my preferred way to live.

Juicy opportunity exists in this blank slate. Yet I/we forget. I fall into rutted living. Routine roteness. It happens to all of us. The slate, oh-so-laden and oh-so-familiar. Yet, as humans I know we're wired for something else. We're wired for breakthroughs that return us to Blank Slate Being. We respond to events. To calendars. To tragedies. To pain. To ritual. To grace. We open. We pause. We Begin Again. A New Year. Poised on a precipice of time----we are anything but rutted. Not yet.

I glance up. A wren camouflaged in the white aspen bark flits. I see it. My seeing is the gift. I feel myself attune, boldly present for more against the brilliant blue sky. There's another. Oh my---there go two, no three more. Now I can't take my eyes off them.

We twenty first century humans greet each other in the new year...wired for connection. We step, just a little, out of what we see as "ordinary" time. There's a sincerity. A true desire here. We "get" that something is possible---and we speak of it and for it on behalf of all beings. With fireworks, toasts, rituals---we kiss the possibility of our collective blank slate. We bless it. We name it. Sounds primitive, yet it may be some of our highest functioning. What if we really believed it. That this year---2012, holds all that can be. Jubilee. Hope. Love. Connection. A New Way.

Here's to your blank slate. Today. This hour. This moment in which your heart beats, your fingers feel, your skin warms, your ears catch a faint wound. Your eyes see flitting...moments ago unseen. This gift of life---yours and mine---pulses. And pulses some more. Whether we notice it or not. Flowing blood and air, nerves and chemicals, water and life, streams and consciousness. To be here to witness and participate on this blank slate day at 10:57 in the morning of January 2, 2012 makes me grin. It's a fresh book. And you are in it too. Let's turn the page...and...