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Time is not linear. Let's just start there - I don't know where this begins or ends, other than within cycles. It cannot be tamed inside the space of a calendar year, but is ever slowly unraveling and is regathers the next stages of my being. Getting here this year has been a journey. There are so many parts of me that I had to let go of - or more accurately, to meet. There are old versions of myself and habits I picked up along the way that held me under. The weights have been accumulating for years, if I am being truly honest. I've met my edges, laid quaintly with layers of anger and the texture of grief, and let of of parts of me that took 29 years just to be brave enough to greet.
I feel like I am seeing the world again from the eyes of a child - that I am willing to relearn the world through a new set of eyes - with all the innocence and all the fear that comes along with that. Ironically, to relearn the world in this childlike way has brought me closer into what it means to be a woman, not a maiden, not yet a mother, but as a beautiful sovereign being. Learning to love myself has meant that I have looked at the most frightening parts of myself in the mirror and said "ok, I finally see you, and I will love you too. Maybe not today, but one day I will learn to love you, and until them I am going to spend every day relearning the world around me, greeting it in a new way - until it, until I feel like ME again, and not just the reflection of some person I barely know in the mirror."
What does this mean for the year ahead? Well it means that I am truly at a threshold crossing - the beginning and end of a cycle meshed into one moment, happening ever presently, right-the-fuck-now. As I approach the end of my Saturn Return, my thirtieth birthday, and my first full year as a married woman, it only makes sense that I would relearn how to fall in love with life now - or maybe even to fall in love with life for the first time.
I don't see this New Year just as a new beginning, but as a threshold. Not a toast at midnight, but all of the moments and choices that built this singular moment and all future moments wrapped into one. And we will still wake up to another Winter Day tomorrow. 2023 will not miraculously change the composition or the texture of the days we have faced through yesterday, or last week, or this whole past year. And we will still make some of the same mistakes, and we will most certainly grow. And it may not happen in the way that we want it to. But for now, just for right now, my celebrating means lasting inside the deep exhale that is winter. It means thriving in the deep freeze, in the unknown obscure threshold of right where we are, celebrating the beauty and tragedy all in one living breathing acknowledgement of this past year and the one we are entering. As if to reclaim the idea that this one big, beautiful, transformational threshold spans for more than just one day, more than a list of resolutions. It exists inside the womb of winter, gestating the next steps of who we have yet to be: breathing in, greeting our edges, smiling at them, and tending to them like our inner child waiting to be loved.
It is not neat in the way that we humans want things to be, with clear beginning and ends, but it is hopeful.
Hopeful in the same way that buds last on trees through the entire winter before the blooms in the Spring.
Knowing exactly when, and exactly how to shine when the conditions are right.
Patiently, nourishing themselves along the way until they get there.