Today, a songbird across the valley began to sing amidst all the wintry sounds of the morning, and it pierced my heart in a way I found hard to define. Like a creak of a heavy metal door slowly opening a crack, I felt my heart expand an inch further into the world of feeling and realized the degree to which I have battened down the emotional hatches to get through these past few years of grieving. I attune my senses toward discovering the words for what that birdsong unlocked in me.

There are times when you feel an opening up inside of you, where you didn’t even know you were closed.

Feelings. I had to turn away from them a bit to move out of the abyss of grief. I wonder if I’m ready for them now. If I can now tolerate being fully awake to the world and to my own strong heart.

To take life in takes courage. To feel takes courage. Life can batter us, leave us for dead in our souls, but that is only the beginning, there is what comes after all the mourners have left us alone. And yet, after even that, there is the call of life singing all around us and the increasing ability, and then willingness, to hear it.

We choose, at some tiny point after the worst has rolled over us, we choose. We choose  not just to live, but to put our will to our own recovery, to stack our resources, all in, on a square with our name on it. We choose to reinvest, in life.

I know for many, in the dusty corners of our soul, where no one sees, life may sometimes not feel worth living; we are going through the motions, but joy is far outside of us, not even knocking on our door.

To take life in takes courage. To feel takes courage.

It takes courage to dig your finger in the dirt, where you find yourself laying face down in despair, and scratch, to move even that much toward the future that you’re not even sure you believe in. It takes courage to shift your eyes around and find something that pleases you to land on, to allow anything to touch your inner world, bereft as it might be.

It takes courage also, to listen to the springtime song of a bird soaring over the winter landscape, and to allow it to  awaken feelings in you. Feelings of vulnerability. Courage to discover a rawness beneath the armor of survival, still living, alongside the awareness that touching it now, where once was unbearable with pain, is now almost equally, unbearable with something akin to pleasure. To take life in, to let it affect us, takes courage. To make a daily vote and investment in our own well-being takes courage. To move forward, however incremental, takes courage.

Where once was unbearable with pain, is now almost equally, unbearable with something akin to pleasure.

Let’s be courageous. Let’s build a world where we want to exist and feed the good in it, in us. Let’s make all of our resolutions be rooted in love, in self-love and compassion, sprouting from our own healed and courageous hearts and branching out, touching each other overhead in our self-realized majesty.

Let’s make all of our resolutions be rooted in love, in self-love and compassion.

As we rise up and give life to what is best in us, so too do those around us. It can be as simple as opening your eyes where you lay and searching for a reason to go on, or as full of wonder and discovery as noticing the voice of a songbird rising up and straight into your own heart, over the winter landscape