Midsummer Musings
With the arrival of the Summer Solstice, I have been thinking a lot about the word “abundance.” Here we find ourselves in the season of more, when everything is in bloom and the days are long and full.
Each year, with midsummer’s arrival, I’m always shocked at how quickly it comes and goes. It’s hard for me to believe that after this date, the days already begin their descent, shortening by just a minute or two before we even reach July.
Pondering this always stings a little. But that’s what got me thinking about the nature of abundance…
Once upon a time, I use to gaze upon this word with longing. Abundance always felt like something just a bit out of reach. Whether it was relating to the amount of paintings I could create, sell, or the money I would make. It was something that I knew existed for me but I couldn’t quite grasp. When I felt I finally caught some, it would slip through my fingers and it was gone once more.
This was before I realized that abundance is merely energy. Something we know about energy is that it can neither be created nor destroyed. It’s something that universally we do not run out of. Rather, it’s transmuted. Alchemized. It is never really gone. It ebbs and flows. It takes on different shapes. Sometimes it looks like inspiration, sometimes it looks like creative flow, and other times, it looks like cash in your hand.
Sometimes it’s as if a water spout was cranked on at full force, while others it’s more like a trickle — drip, drip, dripping ever so slowly. It’s in these moments that I have learned to rest and not push to produce, and when everything is flowing, I get to let myself ride the current down river.
I think the key to understanding abundance is knowing this, that its very nature is to change. I can’t crank on the water spigot if the well is dry. Sometimes I have to wait for it to be restocked with rest, or redirect the flow by finding somewhere else to put my energy, because maybe I’m putting it somewhere that doesn’t serve me.
This is when I was hit all at once at how simple it truly is. If we live in an ever-changing, ever-moving world, all we really have is now. If I’m holding an abundant moment in my hands, the point is not to keep it forever, the point is to just hold it while I have it. To let the creative current take me away. Undoubtedly, there will be a time where the riverbed needs rain to fill her back up to flow once more. But the beauty of that is this — the rain always returns.