I have to say that in my entire life I have never seen a month of May as crazy as the one that is slowly coming to an end. In the space of a few short weeks we have experienced every season including snow and a heat wave with ten days of each other! Thankfully, this morning we woke to a cooler, more pleasant May with the birds happily soaring about singing their hearts out. Even they haven't been able to summon up much energy when the daytime temperature soared to 91 degrees during the day.
One of the things that struck me as this crazy weather pattern played out was how all of our attention was on how to combat it and make it adhere to our idea of what the weather should be in the month of May. In other words, we were trying to control it. Imagine that! How arrogant are we humans to sit and complain about the weather as if Mother Nature were doing it simply to watch us get frustrated over not being able to be in complete control. While I didn't see any of my animal neighbors actually enjoying the heat/cold/snow/heatwave, except maybe early in the morning or as the sun went down, what I did see was them adjusting their behavior to deal with the constant changes. In other words, they didn't try to control the weather, they just controlled how they experienced it.
One of the hardest things for a human being to do is to admit that they do not have complete control over something in their lives. While there is certainly nothing wrong with the idea that if you want something badly enough, you just have to believe in yourself and work hard to make it happen, there comes a point when we have to be big enough to just surrender ... just let go. We cannot control the weather any more than we can control which season comes next, or when the sun will rise or set. If the animals can accept life as it comes and adjust their perception and behavior to accommodate the changes, we humans should be able to do the same.
Learning when to let go of control allows us to grow and flourish without constraints, going with the flow and adjusting our sails as we go. Just like my noisy blue jay neighbors who work me up this morning with the sound of their calling to each other as they played tag in the cool air, we can learn to soar as well!
And so it is.
