This year in 1 word

A personal update on life in 2023

(Please note: the voiceover and comments are open and free to all readers today. The poll at the end will be available to everyone for 3 days)

Don’t lose sight of the sun - the truth of its ever-wholeness, beyond illusory horizons.

Dearest You.

Sun.

This is the word that summarizes 2023 for me.

Not because it’s been an endless summer, but because I've learned to remember that there is the sun in every season. I’ve realized the sun lends its face to the winter moon and there is, indeed, light in the midnight hours.

For years, I’ve been counting the sun only in its ‘rises and sets’.

I’ve devoted odes to the infinite ways the shifting sun plays with the static horizon; from its dawn-lit embrace to its fleeting freedom across the sky, to its final return into mother’s arms.

To me, the sun has always been a child thrown up into the air, caught again by the world’s wide and open arms. I only saw glimpses of its golden curls bouncing upward at daybreak and falling again at dusk.

This year, however, I’ve finally realized that the sun does not in fact move. This is just a story the earth tells to save itself from the uncertainty of its own constant flux.

There’s a shift that happens when we lose the need to derive our sense of wholeness from the part of us that is constantly separating. It’s like wanting desperately to find our sense of stillness in the ever-rotating earth, rather than remembering the foundational wholeness of our ever-present sun.

We all know the sun doesn’t actually move, yet we live as if it does. We live as if it disappears. We live as if it is something to chase.

For just as many years, I have known this, that what I am is not found in the transient – however, embodiment is a very different animal.

I’m still on the tail-end of a two-year long crisis caused by complex trauma…but I see this ‘tail’ as being one that belongs to an instinctive, intelligent, and wild creature who knows in her bones that

she doesn’t need
to be free
of her ache
in order
to be free.

My mind is no longer something I find my sense of identity in, and this has returned me to something quite unextraordinary and yet unfathomably liberated.

I see now that awakening is an unremarkable event that leads to the most remarkable life.

And so, my message to you, as it will continue to be for me, is - don’t lose sight of the sun - the truth of its ever-wholeness, beyond illusory horizons. It is who you are, despite the tides of this earthly body.

In 2024, this newsletter will simplify this path of remembering the wholeness we are. It will be about creating meditative ways to remind you of what you already know but may not always be able to see. It will be about returning to the wild as a way of remembering our true nature. More than anything, it will be about community – sharing intimate conversations that we all long to have with life.

I am aware of how my work has changed over the past few years - you are not witnessing someone who has become an expert in wholeness and who can now hand down what she knows from some ethereal platform, but someone who is in the thick of it with you, offering what might be of use across the open fire.

Nothing is truer than your own experience and this will never change, no matter who accompanies you along this meandering path.

I will continue to use Insight Timer for new mediations, Amazon for my books, and Substack for unpublished poetry, newsletters, and community. I will not return to social media and rely solely on your generosity to keep this work heading in a heart-based manner.

I long to pull you closer into this whole heart and perhaps be allowed to be held within yours. No matter what happens in 2024, I am eternally grateful for the continued support you’ve given this work – for it is not of my own wisdom, but something deeply known within all of us.

See you in the new year and I look forward to reading your responses to the question I’ve posted here. And if you’d like to see the images our community is sharing throughout this season, feel free to join our chat.

Take care, Much Love,