I feel a shift. A renewed pull towards creating, expressing, and trusting the ideas that keep asking for my attention. It’s subtle, but unmistakable. Like a cool breeze through open windows, something feels as though it is beginning to move again. A time to make subtle changes and listen to the signs.

These moments rarely arrive when our lives are free from worry. Perhaps that is part of what makes them so powerful.

It’s times like these that I think of Archangel Gabriel.

Perhaps the most enduring image of Gabriel in Western art is the Annunciation: the moment Gabriel appears before Mary to tell her that she will give birth to Jesus.

For hundreds of years, painters have returned to this meeting. Gabriel is often shown approaching Mary with a white lily, a flower that became deeply entwined with the symbolism of the Annunciation.

I find myself less interested in the grandeur of the scene than in the intimacy of it:
A message arrives, a life is interrupted, and suddenly there is a before and an after.

So many of the turning points in our own lives begin in much quieter ways. A realization we can no longer ignore, an idea that keeps returning, a truth we finally admit to ourselves, a sentence we know we need to say, a dream that asks us to take it seriously.

We may not know where it will lead, we only know that we have heard it and it is time to dare and let is shine through us … releasing the outcome. 

Perhaps this is why Gabriel has remained such a powerful figure for so long. Gabriel stands at this doorstep between the unseen and the seen, between knowing something inwardly and allowing it to take form in the world.