I’m a little surprised that my heart is filled with hope and not despair on this auspicious day. That instead of focusing on the outcome, I am thinking of the opportunities. I believe that life is given to us so that we may find our own paths to Truth and Love. Sometimes we get off track and decide to linger inside the darkness of the shadowlands of the self, but eventually the light inside points us to home.

Today is primary day for the presidential election in New Hampshire. It’s also the eleventh day of the month. A doorway date. Today, the doorway feels rimmed with hope. The doors present before us to open as wide as we choose through the hands of our hearts.

I voted just a short while ago. The parking lot in our small town was crowded with cars, yet each waited patiently for their turn. Inside the voting hall, people queued into lines, while others greeted those who may be confused where to go. I was one of the confused ones, until a kind selectwoman guided the way. As I stepped into the empty line blocked from view by the one beside it, a couple discovered they had followed, unknowingly, the longer queue of bodies. I stepped back, and ushered them ahead of me.

I think they were grateful, the seemed so. It didn’t matter really, because it was the right thing to do. I was in no rush, and they had been waiting longer than I. I watched as they took their ballets from the smaller stack of red before I took mine from the blue. I looked around, noticing the tables that seemed to all share smaller piles of red than blue.

It’s okay, I thought as I marked my choice and sent it into the ballet machine, I had voted with my heart. It’s okay, I thought, if the election, in the end, turns out contrary to what I hope for. It’s happened before. It may happen again.

It’s okay, because that is how Life works. I cannot still the hand that votes, or guide it to another choice. I can merely guide my own, in the best way I can, toward Love and Truth. In the teachings of the mysteries and of yoga, the individual journeys not just toward Love and Truth, but toward non-judgement. Of the self, and of others. Realizing, as s/he journeys, that there is, in essence, no separation.

As I journey through the spiral, taking yet another circle inward, I find that I have been offered another lesson in acceptance. It is not a giving in to futility, though, but a giving into hope. The heart opening, rather than shutting off. Resisting the impulse to pull open the doors I may think others should walk through, I find myself returning to the doors around my own heart. Who am I to judge the best outcome for humanity and the world? The ego reigns with fear in so many forms when we succumb to its seductions.

The body grows tired with restriction and the holding in of tension. So does the mind. So does the spirit. Life breathes freely through love. Pure and simple. It seeks always the one true path. We are the keepers of our own souls. The body, their house for a time, is kept clean or cluttered with debris by the individual housed inside of it. The choice is held within.

I look around at the gray winter day knowing that the light outside my home is only veiled by a cover of clouds. Eventually it will break through and the sky will spread wide its blue expanse to the sun. It may not be today, or even tomorrow, but the light, eventually, and always, breaks through the darkness.