Abundance

Abundance.

This is my word for 2014.

A word that I have so rarely used in my life; the concept of abundance has seemed almost foreign to me. I have spent much of these first 40 years of my life attaining, building, earning and in many ways enjoying the fruits of my labor, but the idea of living in abundance has never really occurred to me. Perhaps I was confusing this term for the extremes of excess or gluttony or avarice. Abundance is none of these things.

My childhood was not filled with abundance. Greed, envy and judgment? Yes. But definitely not abundance. This lack of security resulted in fear of scarcity and a relentless pull to make ends meet, provide for the family and “build a life for myself.” According to the Catholic priest Richard Rohr this is the task of the first half of life, to build one’s container for living and I would say that I have managed to complete this task relatively well.

Only recently have I begun to sense a feeling of fullness, a calm roundness, deep, joyful pleasure in my soul. I wasn’t sure what I was sensing and then I had a dream. It was what I like to call, “a healing dream,” the kind that when you wake up you feel at ease and reassured.

The dream took place in mid-air. I could not see myself but I was somehow suspended and floating in an ethereal space. I stared at a large floating cauldron. It was luminescent and large. It gave off a type of hologram depth and it seemed that I would never be able to reach it.  I watched and into the container poured tears from what I understood to be all of human kind. The significance of this was profound to me and I wondered, while dreaming, what it all meant. The constant flow of tears seemed oddly soothing and I knew there was comfort in that vessel.

When I awoke I thought of how many tears were being poured into that hovering bucket, yet the bucket was never full. There was such an abundance of tears but it all was calm and good. Then the word abundance struck me. As I mulled over the word I started to think that abundance is not just a thing to have but also something to feel. Abundance is not as much about having a lot, as it is about deeply living into your soul. And perhaps this is the reason I had been feeling so full recently, my soul work was paying off. God was doing God’s work on me.

As I enter 2014, I would like to continue nurturing this feeling of abundance. Not through accumulation of material goods but rather through continuing to feed my soul with gratitude, meaningful relationships and sharing my many blessings with this wounded human race.