ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time there was a new year. She emerged wrinkled and wet from being long over due, her shoulders bruised by her journey through the dark Gates of Life. Her watery eyes squeezed shut at the bright light of reality: where was her safe dark world? Her tiny fists sprang to her eye sockets to protect her untried eyes. She felt the warm arms of her compassionate mother, heard her soothing voice, and when she heard again her mother's deep rhythmic heartbeat, she began to relax.

This little year had had many past lives. Many many incarnations full of tragedy and suffering, progress and Light that now lived in her cells but not in her memory. She knew nothing of the mistakes she'd made before, the wonders of Life on Earth she'd already experienced, or the many days ahead of learning that awaited her. And although her cells were also full of her extensive family, she had yet to meet the billions of entities that comprised her relations, as she slept in her mother's loving embrace.

Her calling to this lifetime indicated great wisdom accumulated through the ages. To begin with, she faced tremendous challenges just to survive, for her environment was fraught with threats from the air she had just begun breathing to the food she would soon eat. From the microscopic to the planetary, she would need to apply her prodigious creativity--once she mastered not only the languages of her extended family, but found new language to describe the yet unknown developments that were rapidly taking place in her environment.

Because so much depended upon her in this particular lifetime, she arrived with extra helpers in the unseen worlds. Her previous lives had keenly enhanced her gifts in foresight, intuition and courage to match her high intelligence. One special entity tended her sense of humor, which would expand very quickly and aid her throughout her days. Little did she know, lying there under the adoring gaze of the beloved mother, that those days were numbered, and she would be constantly stretching and changing while she fulfilled her mission.

Her little hand rested on her pink blanket. Why her? Why this point in time? With God's grace, she was the perfect container for the work to be done. She would embrace all her relatives and offer them a little more time to complete their own missions. She would embrace friends and enemies alike, bringing them to greater awareness of their interdependence. She would sustain the crops, the animals, all the little microorganisms, to multiply and divide in co-creation in their season. Like a microchip embedded in her pineal gland, two words arrived with her as she inhaled the delicate smell of her mother's breast, and finally latched on successfully to the creamy nector: Greatest Good. Her brief time would be unequivocally devoted to nurturing the greatest good for her human family, until her last days found her again melting into the dark December skies.

So much unknown awaited her! But for now she would sleep after her exhausting but safe arrival, a happy new year.