One of my favourite peaceful places in the area I live (Hockley valley near Orangeville) is the pond on the Ecology Retreat Centre property. I can sit there for a long time and the calmness and serenity fills my being very quickly. Everything has its effect: the sound of the water entering the pond, the crickets humming, the frogs singing at night, the breeze playing in the bulrushes. Recently while sitting in silence by the pond my attention was drawn to the shoreline. I observed the amazing flourishing of life along that shore. Where the water met the earth, life was abundant. Pickerelweed, bulrushes and cedars grew verdantly; red-wing blackbirds nested; millions of insects flourished; frogs and toads languished in the shallows; brook trout hunted in the water; and a river otter had its burrow under the bank.

It reminded me of the edges we meet in life. There are thousands of big and small edges that we all come to in life: between sleeping and waking, between listening and speaking, between graduation and our first job, between renting and buying a house, between a misunderstanding and a new awareness, between a divorce and a new relationship. The edges of life are endless, yet that is where the potential of incredible personal growth can happen. It is essentially the space between the known and the unknown. We cannot avoid the edges of life. Life can blossom between the meeting of an older reality and a new one. The question is what do we do when we are in middle?

It seems to me that there are three choices:

1. We can hold onto what we know, re-affirm our old way of being and try to impose the old upon the new as it comes into being. We can reach into the past for what worked for us then and try to force this onto the future. This is like continually mowing down all the new growth that we feel is antagonistic to our old plans. But it leads to a conflict between the old and new and an incredible expenditure of energy to continually impose our will on the bank. This is the way of fundamentalism. We will eventually regret what we have done.

2. We can just give-up and give into the new and choose to do nothing... decide that there is nothing we can do and surrender to being a victim. We can just let everything grow wild and let the pond fill in with bulrushes and everything will become a marsh. This is the way of anarchy. We will eventually regret what we haven't done.

3. We can decide to be open in the face of the new challenge. We can sit with all the uncomfortable sensations of the new: the fear, the frustration, the excitement and the grief as we let go of the old way. We can observe without forcing and ask, "What is really happening here?" or "What is the blessing behind this difficulty?" We can discover what new truth is coming into our lives. As we discover this we can use the new flow that has entered our lives to move us in the direction we want to go. We can work with nature rather than against it: to observe and learn how we can use the yields of the naturally growing vegetation, to cultivate the bank with edge-loving edible plants and to create a habitat for fish that can sustain us. In a similar way we can gain insight on how our inner being is moving us in a new more life affirming direction and take advantage of it. We will find that within every difficulty there is a solution. The key is to embrace the difficulty and fully understand it and then the resolution will become clear. As one of my workshop participants once said; "Life is like school only you get the test first and then you get the lesson". This is the way of Awakening. It is the way of no regret.