We started a new turn a few days ago, And I don’t know about you but what I hope for this new year is to keep my eyes open, to stay curious, to listen to things inside and outside that tell me how, when, and why to live more in relationship with liberation for all beings.
I have been feeling my way through these winter days as an animal. My body wants to sleep and hold the children. It wants to get lost in the absurdist poetry that is sharing life with them. The funny voices. They’re jokes that get repeated so many times whether I laugh or not. I want to take very short walks to the big stump on the corner of the road where the suburbs start and marvel at the tower of oyster mushrooms.
I want to watch the fog burn off and greet the neighborhood cat, the crow, the eucalyptus, and the man who lives across the street with a big American flag planted in his front door.
I love a new year. I love the chance for reflection. The permission for being new. I love how after a month of cookies and cheese plates we get to return to the simple austere pleasures of winter vegetables.
But mostly I love the way we get to imagine and ask one another about our imaginations for the future. We recognize ourselves threading through our lives and mark the turn of the year as an inflection point.
We have an opportunity with the inertia of the turning of the wheel to become, to recommit, or to discover ways of interbeing that let us fall more in love with living as a practice of freedom. So while you sit in the dark nights of winter I invite you as we begin again to first imagine the practice of freedom for yourself, your community, your world, and all the points in between. Let it be weird, expansive, full of ten thousand stars and the darkness between the stars (as my friend Holly Wren Spaulding would say.)
And then let that imagining turn to practice. May all beings everywhere be safe, be happy, know love, and live with ease.
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A reminder that next week we’ll be meeting for Book Club, January 10, 5:30 PST