Years ago, the holiday began to lose its luster for me, and in 2008, a cycle of release began that cut deeper and deeper year after year until I no longer belonged in my old world. I felt like a child, outside in the cold, looking through windows at warm holiday celebrations.
This year, however, something is different. Time has expanded and everything is present all at once. I sense the ghosts of Christmases past sitting with me once again, and yet I'm also strangely beyond them. Like Lester Burnham in the closing scene in American Beauty, I am floating in a zone above it all where I can see what was once my experience, all the joy and the sorrow of it, and know I am more than the sum of those parts. My perspective has been flipping from one viewpoint to the next with lightning speed and simultaneously expanding to encompass all of it. It is bittersweet and beautiful, and a bit overwhelming.
Like years prior, my body is once again releasing. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The shifts have come this month, one upon another, with a stunning frequency and intensity, and I've spent many days rebalancing my body and breathing.
Like my body, the way I access my wisdom is also evolving. I can't always connect the way I used to. Instead my knowingness has been popping up in unexpected ways that I can’t control or sometimes even understand, and that has been disorienting.
Yet, about all these experiences I feel an odd neutrality. As uncomfortable as things get some days, I know none of it is that important. I recognize everything is falling apart and falling away for a reason. Since I can’t figure out what comes next, there is nothing to do but surrender. I recently let go in a way I never could have before, and upon doing so, immediately felt a wave of love wash over me.
The solstice marks the return of the light. 2016 was a year of completion, a 9 in numerology. My knowingness tells me that 2017 marks the beginning of something very new and different for me, and perhaps for us all. We know something is different, and change is scary. A new level of responsibility is being asked of us, and we may not yet know just what that means.
What I do know is that no new thing emerges directly out of the old thing. There is always an emptying out, which often takes longer than we desire, and may go deeper than we expect. Only in the emptiness can the seeds that were planted within us, often without our knowing, sprout and take root. Allowing this to unfold naturally requires patience and willingness and tremendous trust.
Newness knows what it is about. It knows how to move into us and through us out into the world. It does not banish the darkness; it welcomes it. It has its own timing, and there is perfection in it. It gifts us our freedom, and we are not to micromanage this unveiling to protect ourselves. We couldn't if we tried. All we can do is welcome the gift and allow it to remake us.
Happy New Year, my friends. I mean this most literally.