A reading we adapted from Elizabeth Tarbox's wonderful book of meditations, Life Tides:
“It’s strange to talk about New Year’s resolutions when so little can ever be resolved. Resolving suggests to me completion…the tying up of loose ends. I’m lucky if I resolve the laundry or dinner plans; I can never hope to resolve my feelings or my behavior.
The best I can do it to try to be aware of these feelings that have no name, that crowd each other, bubbling up sometimes like a mountain spring, and more often like a broken fire hydrant. My days are a series of unresolved feelings. With all life has taught me of the cycles of birth and death, the orderliness of the universe, and the arbitrariness of our individual fortunes, there are still moments in almost every day when my weeping voice cries out, “Oh no, don’t let this happen.”
…[While I do] keep open the invitation to love…the price I pay for all this openness is an equal amount of fear. The price I pay for loving is the panic of pessimism. The shower of well-being and gratitude is opposed by the slimy mud of jealousy, anger, and bitterness; my appreciation of this exquisite planet brings with it the weight of knowing I am contributing to its ill health…Unresolved feelings, prayers which cannot be answered to my satisfaction without breaking the very laws of nature that the Creator took such care to establish.
This year I’m not making resolutions, or asking a higher source to resolve things for me. This year, as I take my self-inventory, I’m aiming for the continued willingness to keep the doors of my feelings open, to participate in life as well as to observe it, to contribute more to the solutions and less to the problems.”
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