I am not one to normally summarise in calendar years.
Keeping important dates in my head is not a strong point of mine.
But where there is a strong emotion attached, we tend to remember with more clarity.
I remember the day Elvis died. It was the day of my first school social. I still remember what I wore, a velvet Holly Hobby skirt and vest I had borrowed from my sister.
2020 will be a year we wont easily forget.
The emotions we experienced early on in the pandemic stirred up the best and worst in us.
Watching the news as we were entering our first lockdown, I remember feeling a mix of comedy and horror as news stories of loo paper and guns sales went through the roof.
I know, that the turning of a calendar page doesn't mean that the first day of 2021 will magically create some utopian world, where animals are revered and not treated as disposable, where the population has not pilfered the earths resources to the point of no return, where children are loved not beaten, and pornography is not the choice of distraction as young boys ride the bus to school.
I like to imagine that globally we have something to learn from this year.
That would be a big silver lining.
In June this year (another reason 2020 will be unforgettable for me) I lost my beautiful mum.
It was a phone call from the blue.
A driver on the wrong side of the road, 100km’s an hour, in a 50km zone, collided with my mother in her car.
Just like that, one minute she was going about her day and the next moment it has been taken.
How fragile our human existence is.
Mum was an example of someone who quietly went about her business of changing the world, one interaction at a time.
The outpouring of love that came from all corners of New Zealand was humbling. She had touched so many lives with her presence and grace.
She was an incredible Mum. She raised 4 young children on her own after our dad died.
She actively nursed in hospitals and clinics for almost 5 decades and was a minister of her faith.
Mums life had given her rich experience in all aspects of life and death.
From Baptising babies in church, to immunising them in the medical centre.
Marrying couples, burying friends and having a knack for being first on the scene at road accidents.
If she had survived, Mum would have been the first person to race in to help the man behind the wheel that steered into her car.
She would ask that we hold no anger in our hearts.
When we are touched by the grace of those that live their lives in essence nature, it has a rubbing effect. A transmission of something intangible and yet fully expressed.
We as individuals may not have the power to convince countries to reduce their fossil fuels, or to convince billionaires to spend big on solving famines and diseases.
But individually we have the capacity to live our lives lovingly, to share our gifts, and to ask that we awaken in others the love for their own lives.
I am grateful for all the teachers in my life, my mum, my kids, my spiritual teachers, life, death and pandemics.
Its not from the place of ease we find our growth. But navigating life through all her challenges. The pain and heartache, the uncertainty and fear. We can choose to shrink and contract in these times, or we can take pause, find stillness within, anchor to the presence of God or consciousness, so that we can allow for life to flow through us.
It is in this we find the grace and beauty within ourselves, and all around us.
Like waves in an ocean, each thinking it is seperate from the other, and yet all made from the same material. When one wave finds peace, then all waves have the capacity to feel the same.
Is this hope? I think so.
Good bye 2020, perhaps you weren't so bad after all!
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