Another Morning, Another Beginning, Another Life

Happy Groundhog Day!

“Let’s live here!” Bill Murray as Phil the Weatherman in Groundhog Day.

There are so many beginnings to choose from. This year I did not recognize January 1st as my start-over date because I was in the emergency room of an over-crowded hospital while my anxious family hovered close. Nor did I acknowledge the 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany, January 6th, the day I came home from the hospital as the new year, the way my ancestors might have. I decided I was going to skip January altogether and go with the new moon and the year of the wood snake at the end of the month. Or maybe I needed a few more days to get it right, to feel fresh, to feel reborn into health—and I’d honor Imbolc, the holiday of my Irish kin. Or as always I’d wake up to a new day that is the same day inside the same soul going round and round on Groundhog Day.

To live in a straight line—the line of historical timelines, imagined progress, anthropocentric evolution—is to imagine a beginning and, of course, inevitiably an end point. Every sentence concludes with a period. To imagine genesis is to predict revelations. Patriarchal conceptions have kept us stuck inside apocalyptic scenarios for a long time so that we can only imagine straight lines rocketing us away from this planet and its problems. We will “achieve” enlightenment (which really meant extinction…) and be done with these ceaseless cycles of birth, death and rebirth.

But to live in the circles that define the cosmos—the circles that spins our solar system around the spirals of the Milky Way, our round planet around the round sun, our round moon around our round earth—is to know that beginnings are both arbitrary and ceaceless. We are always in motion and always returning.

We go to sleep and we wake to a new day. Today is the first of the year. One moment we will die and we will wake to a new life. That will be the first of the year. Our breath goes out and then we inhale. Every moment can be the first moment. Today is the solstice, tonight is the new moon, tomorrow is the equinox. We can claim a new day or a new year or a new possibility at any moment.

At the same time, no one goes anywhere in a circle. Progress and evolution are really just change and transformation, not headed somewhere away, but always circling back to where we’ve been. The tide goes out and the tide comes in. The earth breathes out and the earth breathes in.

In Groundhog Day, the greatest masterpiece about reincarnation, a disgruntled weatherman, who wants to transcend his job and go on to bigger and better things, finds himself stuck inside his least favorite day in his least favorite place…day after day. Every day he wakes to the same day stuck inside a place he cannot escape. There is no trajectory that can help him transcend—all the roads out are blocked by snow.

We are all Phil, awakening to the same reality day after day. Here we are on this planet. No one goes anywhere. Whenever someone says to me, “I don’t want to be reborn,” I always say a little prayer that they realize that everything and everyone is reborn…no one goes anywhere. It’s the first law of the conservation of energy an matter. Knowing that we ARE reborn is the first part of knowing what to do with those circles of eternity.

Phil, played hilariously by Bill Murray, goes through various stages. At first it is only horror and disbelief. He does not want to be reborn in Punxatawney one more time! As awareness dawns that whatever he wants, he will, he decides he is a god—he can do whatever the hell he wants, manipulate this reality, control it even for his own gain. He learns to avoid some of the worst pitfalls and mud puddles that he’s stepped in over and over again. He can have as much money or sex as he wants. If you want to know how “enlightened” your local guru is, it’s Phil in the early days of his awareness. But he tires, eventually, of control and wants only, like the Buddha, extinction. But no matter what he does, he awakens the next morning, back where he has always been.

What transforms Phil, eventually, is small and surprising.

Every morning as he leaves the bed-and-breakfast he despises he meets a woman on the street who he ignores. She is the local piano teacher. One day, Phil goes to her house and demands a piano lesson. He is terrible. But a thousand days later, ten thousand days later, he is a virtuouso. Exhausted by control and despair, Phil finally begins to claim his heart’s desire. That choice leads him to joy and that joy brings him community and delight and recognition and frienship and finally the woman of his dreams.

What would you do TODAY at this moment if you really knew how much time you had, how long was the story of your soul? The first day of our soul’s is the piano lesson, that moment we embrace the possibility that we have all the time in the world.

We no longer what to jettison ourselves somewhere else, we are exactly where we belong—on a blue-green planet spinning around a glorious sun, a wide-eyed moon above us, those stars, this earth, this water, this life, this soul, here here here is where we belong.

Phil never wants to leave Punxatawney. Why would we ever abandon what we love?

Today on Groundhog Day ask yourself, “What is it my heart wants that my heart would pray for day after day, year after year, lifetime upon lifetime?”

What is the prayer that would let me love living here?

Every morning Phil awakes to the same song on the crappy little clock radio by his bed. It’s Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe.” No detail in this movie is extraneous. Phil is HELD in Pawxatawney…the cosmos HAS him. Because to live in the great circles of the cosmos is to be held by those generous circles of return and reunion. When we live in those circles, we live in love again, in the knowing that all beings are reunited with each other.

No one goes anywhere.

All my books, in one way or another, about the long story of our souls. Groundhog Day is sacred to me, a day to remember that the friend who left too soon is reborn to a another friend, that the mother I miss might be the child I am asked to hold, that one day I will be reborn to those I love—and I pray they can see who I really am.

To honor that moment we all become who we already are by taking that first piano lesson. We might such for 9,000 lifetimes but it doesn’t matter if we are following our hearts. Then we will be right where we belong.

Happy Groundhog Day everyone!

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of the ecological fellowship The Way of the Rose and the co-author of the book of the same name. She teaches workshops on collaborating with the dead.

Perdita also has a paid substack that includes a monthly conversation on working with the other side as well as excerpts from her works in progress.