Waking in the half light of  a new day and into a new year, I go out into the frozen morning with a hummingbird feeder to hang it in the dogwood tree, a bare winter branch with spring buds waiting.  Walking down the long narrow lawn to fill the seed feeder I am moved deeply by the silence of the morning.  I savor the cold against my bare skin, the brittle crunch of heavily frosted grass under my feet disturbing the hush.  I am grateful for the perfection of this winter day, being alive to witness the dawning alone – no birds yet risen with song.

The abundance of my life is not lost on me.  The frigid morning was there to greet me.  I did not have to sleep outside in the cold.  I have a home.  It was a warm and comfortable bed I arose from.  There’ll be hot coffee with cream and breakfast to follow, clean clothes.

A few days ago I had the realization that in addition to the love and light I do my best to practice and live, that I still held judgment and anger for the transgressions of the past.  The past is behind me.  Unless I put it into my present.  And worse into my future.  My rightful concerns for the injustices and the inequalities that exist in the world today have been so clouded over by my conditioning.  No matter where my heart has been coming from, my mind still had control.  I don’t want to simply change my mind – change can equal little more than another word slipped in to replace anger.  A word with the matching emotion such as indignation, resentment, acrimony or bitterness.  Change isn’t benevolence or good will – transcendence is.

Anger is valid.  Anger though, must be put to good use.  Anger is my teacher shifting my perspective more fully towards forgiveness and embracing the light.  Injustice isn’t healed by anger alone, by recounting each outrage or prejudice, all the oppressions and breaches in dignity.  I cannot make the reparations in the outside world.  The trespasses of the past can only be healed inside my own head and heart.  I see how I need to stop ripping back the scab that makes the wounds bleed.  I am willing to transcend the mind, create a new pattern.   Connect the head and the heart.  This, says Chief Phil Lane, Jr. is the longest journey a human being will ever undergo.  I am tired of this walk – on a treadmill going nowhere – I am learning.

I will step anew onto a path of calm and kindness, contentment without complacency for a new dawn to rise within my heart each minute of the day.  As I transmute this old way of being, I create the possibility of a dawning of light, a healing elixir and salve that transcends anger into charity and peaceable forbearance.  Of a heart alleviated from the long-suffering anger of the past.  As another one of my teachers said this morning, “…when I go to do something, or manifest something, I always start with a prayer, put out the intent for things to manifest.  That is the teaching.  Sometimes we just forget to apply our tools and we have really good ones.”.

At the genesis of this new year, I put up this prayer – for gratitude, for peace of mind, of forgiveness, and for the manifestation of a new dawn and anger that lives in the past.

Mitakuye Oyasin  ~  All My Relations