There is always something blooming here in central Florida, it seems. I’ve been here just over a year now, and it is striking to me that even on the coldest days, the palm trees are always green, the azaleas are budding, there are roses to be found. Something is always thriving, or beginning to blossom. The image posted here, I took at St. Leo University, looking toward Lake Jovita, on a 40 degree afternoon...
It reminds me of the basic philosophy behind the yoga I teach—“There’s always more.” It can be hard to see in the depths or winter, in colder climes, but the universe is always making more of itself, and so can we. There is always more to learn, another area in which we can grow, a new relationship to develop, a new book or podcast or blog to discover.
I am part of a support group that is made up largely of women old enough to be my mothers and grandmothers.
Every week, at our meetings, it is immensely encouraging to witness each other learning, growing, changing—even among “senior citizens”. In our spiritual lives, in the craft of our daily life and work, in us as individuals and as a group, something is always blooming.
“There’s always more” also means, for me, that the divine is always bigger than we think. We can get super attached to and identified with our human concepts of God—our labels and doctrines that seem so important— but there is always more than will fit inside even our most precious boxes. The infinite eludes our mental grasping. There is always more to learn, and to let go of, in our theology…
And the welcome the Holy One offers is always bigger than we think. Our concerns about who is “in” or “out” of our religious or spiritual clubs, our concerns to be higher or better, our neglect of those whose beliefs or life choices are different from our own—these show us to be terribly small and petty, Grinch-like, by comparison to the divine, who creates, sustains, and embraces all. There is always more mercy, more grace, more love from the Source of all being.
One of my favorite verses in the Christian Scriptures comes at the end of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, where he describes the divine as
“able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within us” (Eph 3.20).
There is always more coming toward us, coming through us—more than we could ask or imagine. This verse encourages me to keep asking, and keep watching, to keep celebrating the things that are blooming within and all around me. Even when the world seems dark or cold or bleak or just boring, if I take time to look—there’s always more.
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