Here it is, another fall in masks; another season of uncertainty. I am beyond sick and tired of this horrid virus. But there is another equally concerning virus going around: It piggybacked in on Covid, opportunistically coming in the door that the physical virus opened. It is the virus called Fear.

We’re almost there my friends. We’re at the finish line of 2020: the craziest, weirdest, most tumultuous, contentious, painful, scary, exhausting year that most of us have ever seen.

“There is a mantra I love that can help enormously with this process we call Life. I saw it written on a whiteboard in a yoga class one day and I have adopted it as one of my Core Principles for Living. Here it is:

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say this month. My mind and heart are troubled by what I see and hear: Division, anger, violence, finger-pointing, hypocrisy, grandstanding, virtue-signaling, and a whole lot of agitated herd behavior. It’s truly disturbing.

Are you as tired of hearing and reading about this horrid virus as I am? It’s like hearing about the hurricane that’s brewing off-shore: we hear report after report, we prepare, we hoard, we hunker down and we wait and worry and watch the news and wonder if it will really hit, and when, and whether it will hit us, or just those other unfortunate people.

Chinese medicine calls viruses “Pernicious Evil Influences,” which sums it up pretty perfectly. They are all three of those things. But while viruses are nasty, the anxiety they generate is worse … much worse.

I’ve been dealing with some big issues lately, things that hurt my brain and stir my emotional pot; things that if not kept on a tight rein release a toxic tsunami of anxiety. So I picked up Eckhardt Tolle’s A New Earth to try to get some perspective.

What do Donald Trump, a trip to Costco, and my dog have in common? More than you might imagine. A strange confluence of events culminated this morning in a surprising, personal revelation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Not the When Harry Met Sally sort, or the infatuation/lust/heartbreak/revenge tedium on the radio that makes my 10-year-old daughter ask, with a look of pure nausea and disgust on her face, “Why are all the songs about love?”

Trust is tricky. It’s all very easy to have trust when everything is going swimmingly; it’s another thing altogether to maintain total trust when you’re hanging on by your fingernails. Or fins. Whatever.

Five hundred years ago cartographers, imagining what lay beyond the known borders of the earth, poetically wrote that beyond a certain point in the uncharted seas “there be dragons.”  Dragons are the mythological, metaphorical expression of our innermost fears; the sea they inhabit our unknown future.

My last return to Jacksonville closed the loop of a thirty-year meander that took me from Jacksonville to Chicago, San Francisco, back to Jacksonville, Ashland, Portland, San Francisco again until it siren-songed me back in 2002. By then l had accumulated a lot of stuff, most of which did not fit into a modest, circa 1889 house.

A couple of years ago, I came across an idea that completely changed the way I view human evolution. What it said was basically this: that all spiritual growth and unfoldment comes from letting go. This simple little sentence was, for me, revelatory.

What do monkeys, the new year, and spiritual growth have to do with one another? Amazingly, quite a lot.