My three-year-old daughter, Morgan, started preschool this fall.  Every day on the way home, she sings me the song they've learned that day.   One of the first, and my favorite, was a song for going to the playground on those beautiful fall days, and it goes something like this:
We don't let go of the rope, we don't let go of the rope,
When we go for a walk we don't let go of the rope.
I loved its obviousness.  The picture it conjured of preschool cuties, each holding their own rope loop on their way across the street and singing.  And I loved its subtlety; the way the message could be applied to other things, from mountain climbing to the hope of spring.  It's a song about how we cope when we are stretching our boundaries.
Today I'd like to talk with you about the rope I hold onto at this time of year - when the last three sermons I have heard have all been on Winter Doldrums and the bleakness of February; when the last week has seen me trapped inside the house with my and then my daughter's flu; when the simple task of taking the trash out becomes the chore of donning extra pairs of socks, the wet boots left outside, mittens, scarf and coat.  
The hope is in the days getting longer and brighter; the new, sparkling snow with its reminders to go sledding; in the faith of a scientist that spring must return; and in the stories of old.  Kore and Demeter's story.  The story of Exodus in the Bible.  The Buddhist story of "Her Father's Garden," in which a Tibetan innkeeper and his daughter live on a mountain high above the snow line.  Together they imagine a garden in their backyard, and thanks to the faith of all the villagers, it manages, despite the snow, to bloom.  
Stories are my rope.  
I was always one of those kids who read under the covers until all hours.  I could have had worse vices.  But sometimes stories are too much my rope.  My New Year's resolution was that for the month of January, I would buy no new books.  Yet stories that remind us that deprivation has an end are my rope at this time of year.  

I know I'm not alone in needing that rope.  A few weeks ago, a friend asked me how she could get back her sense of God.  "I used to believe in some beautiful Higher power," she lamented, "but now it's just blank.  It's gone.  It's like nothing's there."
I've had the same experience, a few years of a deadening sense that nobody else was out there taking care.  I didn't want to tell her how long it took me to get that sense back, or that my concept of God since then has changed immeasurably.  I didn't want her to despair.  I forgot she is already despairing.  She is mired deep in the experience of February.  But it's not a calendar February that will end in twelve days; it is a spiritual February, one that can stretch out for years to come.
William Bridges' Transitions puts her experience in a framework.  His book on change outlines the three psychological steps we go through as we re-create ourselves.  He calls the three parts of change, in rather Star Trekkian terms, endings, the Neutral Zone, and beginnings.  
We are all familiar with endings and beginnings.  But what's this Neutral Zone?  It's the time you have to grit your teeth through; the time when any sense of the holy seems absent; the time when you're in the dentist's chair, almost done, and the Novocain has worn off, and they ask, "Can you hold on?  Just one more minute."  It's the time of Wandering in the Desert.
This Neutral Zone appears in the story of Persephone and Demeter.  Kore had to crawl through a tunnel and realize she could not turn around; an end to her previous life on the surface.  She had to wait in Hades, unable to see the ghosts that lived there or to enjoy herself.  Until finally she ate something.  And then she came to see herself as a new person, Queen Persephone.  She began her new life with a new name.
I think Bridges missed one of the middle steps.  Before we can begin again, we have to make a choice.  Before we take action, we have to have a certain level of confidence that our next step will turn out all right.  Because we can easily get stuck in that Neutral Zone.  It's an awful place to be, but an even  worse place to anticipate being again.
Unless we make a choice to step out of it, we can remain mired in that unsteady place of not-knowing, not-believing, not being ourselves but being the crisis.  Each of us needs a certain amount of faith that our next step will move us to a better, not a worse, place.

It was Kore's moment of eating that was transformational.
That moment of taking something in and allowing where we are now to become a real part of our being.
When we finally come to a new world like Kore did, and are there long enough to believe it can stay solid, we can take that daring first step of eating.  We all have a moment of choice, when we can remain in the holding pattern of inertia or move into a new realm of hope.
Some of us feel defeated as we hear the news of impending war on two fronts; of threats to reproductive freedom; of environmental woes; of violence on the very T we take to work.  These issues can feel so large, so overwhelming, that we back away from the phone call to the White House or the letter to the editor.  We back away from forwarding that e-mail when we're not sure where our friends stand on the issues that are so present and painful to us.  
But those are moments of choice. 
Those are the opportunities to step out of the doldrums, the eternal Neutral Zones.  By eating something as delicate as a pomegranate seed, sending something as small as a letter of rice, we can take in the flavor of a new self.  By taking the first step on a path, whole new worlds and identities open to us. We become activists, or writers, or Queens.
So how is that a rope?
Knowing that it's us that has to change in order to step out of the Neutral Zone, us that has to be ready, lets us take charge.  And taking charge of your life brings hope.  
So I encourage you today to go home and take that simple action.  
Throw away the books about a career you never pursued.
Take a tango class.
Call the president.
Write that love letter.
Do that one thing you never saw yourself doing; that one thing that lets a new door open in your future.  Do that one thing you've been longing to do, and let this be your push, your motivation, your excuse, whatever motivation it is you need.  
Let your life open up like the coming spring.  Choose where you will walk, your new self, as you become who you're becoming.
Amen.

Mandy Neff
Director of Religious Education
Melrose Unitarian Universalist Church