the new year portal
a strange day to make magic
I am not a fan of the Gregorian calendar. It doesn’t follow any rhyme or reason, it pulls our attention away from the moon and the seasons and sets the year according to long-dead emperors.
But it is the default calendar, and so that means the Gregorian calendar new year holds a specific potency. As time marches from 12/31/23 to 1/1/24, billions of people will be giving their attention to this transition from old to new.
That means today is a good day to make some magic.
And we certainly can use some magic these days.
Perhaps, instead of promising to lose weight or gain money, those old capitalist stand-bys, we can use this collective attention to endings as a way to anchor our prayers that these tired and violent systems rooted in domination will find their well-deserved end. Perhaps we can use this collective attention on beginnings to nourish the ways we are re-hydrating ways of being in relationship with the earth and with each other, living in the earth, not on it, awakened to the awe and beauty that exists even within the grief and intensity of systems dying under their own weight.
That is certainly what I will be holding my attention to as the clock strikes midnight tonight.
My own personal new year this year feels like it will be 1/9/24, when my book Returning Home to Our Bodies comes out with North Atlantic Books. If you are in the Pacific Northwest, I will be at Kindred Moon Apothecary in Olympia WA that day from 11am-1:15pm and then again from 3-5pm for readings and book signings (masks are encouraged)
And then on the first new moon of the year, 1/11, I will be reading at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle at 7pm.
I will be announcing additional in-person and virtual events in the coming weeks.