Living My Jubilee

I have been walking my trails a lot lately. There is a long gravel road that runs back toward the creek, with a strip of grass down the middle of it, beautiful green between two gravel tracks. I have always liked that green. It makes the whole thing feel less like a road and more like a path to follow.

I turned forty-nine a few days ago, and it has stirred something in me. Less about getting older, and more about being called back home.

So I have been walking with it. On this particular afternoon it was hot, and my legs were tired. I had already gone four or five miles, and somewhere in there I began to notice how easily I forget my body and how my walk can turn mechanical. I noticed that I was just pushing off with my foot instead of picking up my leg and letting my whole body move. So I had been making myself walk more fully, and my body was letting me know about it as I began engaging muscles that had been forgotten.

I stopped to watch the birds. Bluebirds on the line, a cardinal down in the grass, the swallows cutting back and forth after gnats. I was not really doing anything. I was just there, out on the land, in my own body, having a quiet conversation with all the different parts of myself.

As I continued up the road, something started to dawn on me. For a long time now I have been making this place beautiful. Cutting the low limbs so the trees arch over the path. Setting old monuments where the light will find them. Putting out bluebird boxes and letting the moss grow thick by the house. I had been releasing beauty all around me without ever calling it that, and I think I had been doing it because I wanted to be surrounded by it. I wanted to walk out my door and be met by something that felt like love.

That is when it came to me. Not long before, I had been on the phone with a friend, and he reminded me, almost in passing as we sat there talking, that forty-nine is seven times seven. This is my Jubilee year.

In the old law, after seven cycles of seven years, you reach the Jubilee. It was the year everything got released. Debts were forgiven. Anyone in servitude went free. Land that had been sold off went back to the family it came from. Everybody got to come home.

It was not a reward you earned. It was just time. The horn blew and the slate was cleared, not because anyone had finally gotten it right, but because release was built into the design.

I needed to hear that this year more than I can tell you.

I have carried things for a long time. Mistakes I made, choices I would make differently now, the weight of years spent running harder than I needed to. For most of my life I have held those things against myself, quietly, the way you can carry a debt you never quite stop paying.

The Jubilee underneath this year is that I am beginning to forgive myself for them. Not to excuse them. Just to set them down. To stop charging myself interest on things that are already done.

That is not the part that stopped me on the driveway, though.

The part that stopped me is that the releasing is happening on the inside too, and I did not plan any of it. I have to be honest about that. Most days I would tell you I am mostly lost and confused. I have not had a grand strategy. All I have known to do is keep trying not to shut down, keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep using the practices that have helped me soften. Breathwork to make a little more room inside. Walking and qigong to bring that room down into the body. That is all. I never got up one morning and decided that today I would finally start to forgive myself.

It just started happening. And the more I forgive myself, the more I find I can forgive other people. The more I love the parts of me I used to be at war with, the more I have to give to the people around me. The more I can laugh at myself, the more I can laugh with someone else. It moves outward on its own once it starts. I am not making it happen. It is being done in me.

I have come to think of it like a campfire.

For most of my life there have been parts of me I kept out past the edge of the light. I think that was the ego doing it, the old fight or flight running the show. When that part of you is in command, it cannot afford to let the others in. It has to control everything, so it keeps the rest of you out in the dark.

I am finding now that I can do something different. I can notice a part of me arriving, and instead of fighting it, I can let it come and sit down with me by the fire. Every part can take its place. Slowly we become a whole person.

It does not mean everyone at that fire is under control. It does not mean I have it all worked out. It just means we are finally in the same room. We at least know the other one exists. We are having a conversation instead of a war.

That is the Jubilee I am actually living. The slow welcoming home of everything I am. The releasing of the old grudges I have held against myself. The letting go of who I thought I had to be in order to be allowed to stay.

The grace of it is that most of the time, I still do not know where I am going. Like I said, most days I can feel somewhat lost. I am writing this without a map. And somehow I have arrived here anyway, walking my road, watching the birds, feeling something in me that I can only call forgiveness moving through everything it touches.

It is grace that has carried me this far. I have to believe it is grace that will lead me home.

And maybe that is the invitation, if there is one. Not to go and finally fix yourself, or everyone around you. Not to earn your way back into your own good graces. But to notice where the horn might already be blowing in your life. To see what is being released even without your permission. To open the door a little wider for the part of you that has been sitting out in the cold.

So much of the world is built around going and getting. Go get the next thing, whatever it is. Always reaching, strive, and acquire as we try to finally arrive.

I am beginning to think the truest thing runs the other direction. It is not a going at all. It is a returning, a coming back home.

The strip of grass is still running down the middle of the gravel road. Still green. Still lining the way.

I think I will keep following it and see where it goes.