Awake

While we are in the third month of the year, we are truly at the beginning of the evolving process of growth and change. Spring is the foundation for all things to grow, nurture, and manifest. Appropriately, spring is associated with the element of earth. Spring is when we can start to shake off the quieter feelings of the cold months and start anticipating and participating in nature as it changes before us.
In the winter, we advocate and accept the need to turn inward and be reflective. In spring, too, we should advocate for this inner awareness—this idea of mindfulness—by being awake to the cultivation of new life around us.
Being awake and being mindful are partners on the continuum of living a full and engaged life, for we cannot be successful at one with out the other. Being awake in the world means looking and seeing more than the buds on the tree. It is appreciating the strengths of the roots of that tree which has withstood another season, weathered adversity and come again to be a part of this sacred world.
Some of us get into routines—and many routines are not bad—but, even the best routine, like the one that takes us to the gym five and six days a week can become very unspectacular and mindless. Taking the kids to school, following the same path, the same streets, making the same order for the morning coffee is not necessarily a rut, but it is an opportunity—an opportunity to be consciously awake in our routines, awake in the world that surrounds us, awake to what our eyes see and bodies feel.
Today is a perfect day to practice being more wakeful. Be more present in this beautiful spring world.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake
Henry David Thoreau