From The Innkeepers

On Making a Fresh Start-January 2019

Beginnings. They can be good, magnificent even, or they can simply fail before they’ve had the opportunity to really be launched. With the upcoming New Year’s holiday, I’ve been ruminating this past week on what it means to make a good beginning. It is, I believe, a matter of cultivating the ability to clean out the debris of our lives-that which often stands in the way of our progress. My basket of debris often includes things like taking too much comfort in the old patterns of my day and the lack of willingness to break free of those patterns and try something different. And more often than not, weighing down that basket is what sometimes feels like a two-ton rock named procrastination. So, my resolution is simply this. In spite of all the baggage that accompanies me, to believe that change is possible and to frequently ask myself this question: “What is my first step in order for ___________to happen?”

In some senses our lives and how we came to be here at the Rustic Gate, began precisely with that question. Once the intuition regarding creating this space visited my consciousness is was a constant asking and re-asking what it was that needed to happen in order for this concept to move from the realm of an intuition into manifested reality. So, as we pass through those early days of January, we will on the fourth day of this new year, complete our fifteenth year here as keepers of the Rustic Gate. We approach this threshold with a great deal of gratitude to all who have come here and who share in our vision for this land.

In closing my reflections on the unfolding of this new year, I want to share with you excepts from a poem entitled “For a New Beginning” by John O’Donohue.

“Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening:
Unfurl yourself into the grace of a beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire

Awaken your spirit of adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk.
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.”

May it be so for you, may it be so for us all.
Many blessings be yours in this new year.
Marcia