My two and half year old daughter has recently taken to announcing when "night" comes.  As soon a the sun's light begins to fade she yells "night!" and with equal fervor at dawn the next morning she yells "night all gone!".  I love her sense of rhythm.  I love that she gets excited the death of day and birth of night, and vice versa, with sensitivity to the continual cycling of our daily life. 

We're coming up to a time that represents to most of us the completion of yet another cycle.  We enter the death of our calendar year, and like with any other death this makes space for the springing forth of new life.  Ever regenerating, moment by moment we live and die, and live again. 

So, as we move toward the New Year I wonder if I can get as excited about the birth and death inherent in life as my daughter does every day.  I wonder if I can yell from the roof tops that  in me which I am willing to let die.  And, with equal zeal can I announce the coming of my renewal?  This happens at every layer of our existence - from the birth and death of jobs and relationships to my thoughts, emotions and cells  Author Gary Zukav says this:

"Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particlews.  The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing to mass.  Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality".

I want to know this dance in my very bones - to experience the annihilation and creation of reality every day, in every moment.  Like everything else in our culture, the New Year celebration is often reduced to a time for dedicating to "fixing" our broken characters and chubby bodies and the meaning of renewal is lost.  This year, instead of yoga just being part of your weight loss or anger management plan, can you also see it as your "get to know the real nature of renewal" plan?  In the depth of your practice, when the mind has slowed and the moment has started to emerge in real time, begin to deeply sense the death and birth of life within and all around you.  Let it sweep you into swirling waters of the cosmos, - sensations, thoughts, emotions arising and dissolving in eternity.  Let go of your idea of permanence, until you can hear your subatomic self bellow out the arrival of it's demise and creation like a two year old announcing the coming of night.   

We often think that freedom comes at the "well-done" completion of some task.  Or in the absence or presence of someone or something.  We think it comes from biding our time in our repetitive day to day routines until that precious weekend or vacation or TV show.  Rowan and I definitely have a particular rhythm to our day, most days look just about the same and there is some security in that.  But there is also a sense of drudgery.  Feed the bellies, clean the kitchen, tidy yesterday's mess, get washed, dressed, play, feed ..... over and over again.  At one point recently I began feeling like I was robot, programmed to perform certain duties - inspirationless, emotionless.  It's easy to become patterned into the same repetitive actions, thoughts and attitudes.  It's easy to become disenchanted with daily life.  What if freedom and enchantment doesn't come after the duties of daily life are done?  What if it comes by shaking up the fixations and patterns of our life?  After all it's a pattern we've created, it's not a fixed, inevitable, solid, permanent thing (after all, as the Buddhists say, nothing is!)  Sometimes all that's needed to remember our inherent freedom and the possiblity of fluidity and freshness in our life is to do a few things out of the ordinary - here's a list I've started and few things I've been doing to remind myself of the spontaneous nature of life and my being - try some out and let me know how it feels!

1.  Take some flowers to the hospital. 

2.  Next time you hear a great song on the radio in your car - pull over, turn it way up, tilt your seat back and just listen!

3.  Read something completely different than you'd ever consider. 
 
4.  Visualize your normal daily life and routine, then change or add a few new things - could be bizzarre or mundane - it doesn't matter!  The point is to get your mind thinking outside of fixed patterns.   

5.  Dance for God's sake Dance!  Dance gracefully, ridiculously, just move differently that you normally do in your day.

6.  Pay for a stranger's lunch.

7.  Sit in a forest, better yet, sit in a tree. 

8.  Bundle up and lay in your yard in the late evening and see what night time is like in your neighborhood.  

9.  Get dressed up to do nothing.

10.   Finger paint.

11.  Think outside the box with your yoga postures - bark during downdog!  Wrinkle your nose up during wind relieving pose!  Make up a new pose - the rabbit, the aardvark, the leaning tower of Piza! 

Have fun and tell me what you discover!