Bare Trees

It's January. As if to counteract the scant daylight and barren landscape, we're bombarded each year by peppy phrases:

New beginnings! Fresh starts! Cleansing and purging to reveal the sparkliest version of myself!

Sometimes that all feels inspirational; the push we need to make a change.

But yesterday when the three of us sat down for our first KS meeting of the new year, the mood was different. Talk of new! and bright! andfresh! applies to laundry soap, not our current state of mind. In our circle of friends, we are looking into too many faces of grief today. This is a week of funerals and anniversaries for lives ended much too soon. A nine year old girl. A five year old boy. A beloved husband. A brother. Our hearts are heavy.

So what do we do with our bundle of sadness? How do we actually change the energy into something good? Well truthfully, I don't know any more than you do. But what I have learned from Janet and her yogi brain is that if we draw from something great (that would be...ourselves), we can sometimes branch out from there to those around us, redirecting and building good energy and... yes, karma.

So this week Janet's homework for the three of us is to come back to her with words, sayings, people, ideas, whatever - that just give us pause. Perhaps even give us chills. Because she has a big idea brewing. Huge. As we continue to work on the ever-evolving face of Karmasisters, you'll see what we are working on in 2013. We do hope you like it.

Do something crazy today: add your voice too. What word or phrase resonates with you, right now?

I'll share mine first. As we are starved for light and lightness, I retreat to my favourite lines from Anthem, a Leonard Cohen poem that hangs in my hallway:

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

Here we go. Come along. Our winter tree is bare and we need your energy for it to grow into spring.

Penny