A year of disassembling

The illusion of endings

Musings on cyclicality, karmic patterning, time, loss, and the blade-sharp clarity that comes through it all. To my southern hemisphere friends, thanks for indulging. Feel free to revisit this in 6 months.

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When do you mark the start of the year? What does “The Beginning” of something look like?

The Gregorian calendar is only one way to track time’s tick tick ticking. To celebrate at least one other “New Year” in the wide orbit of a single “year” – turning and returning to that same spot – is to step into an alternate reality. This may be bloomed from the sub-cultural/religio/ethnic identities we carry or it may be attuned to the fact that we are animal bodies that can cellularly sense the most subtle shifts in light, the arc of the sun on the horizon, even with all the apps and clocks and devices that do all this tracking automatically for us. We are still animals.

The more we linger in the parallel universes in which we inhabit away from dominant culture’s seemingly inescapable imprint, we find a diversion path from the swift current. Split, separate, subversive. We slip into it and “time” suspends and reshapes around entirely different associations.

The more “New Years” I add to my own personal calendar through life, the more I tap into the spacious possibilities that can seep into time and expand it. Rosh Hashanah is one, the Winter Solstice is another.

Marking yesterday’s switchpoint from the end of one cycle – the deepest dark – to the tenderest beginning – the lightest bit more light – offers me something radically different than what’s possible on the arbitrariness of December 31st. The celestial rhythms and cosmic timelines, say: don’t rush.

21 > 1 is only 12 steps (days) into the long lift of light reaching its peak in 170.5 more still to come.

The dominant culture says: It’s January 1, 2025. It’s the NEW YEAR! Where’s your bucket list? Q1 goals?! New phone? New car? New you!? Now! NEW! NOW!

The Earth says: Gentle. Easy. It is still time to dream.

It is not even time yet to plant seeds.

The night is still long. It is still so cold.

It is still so dark.

Exactly as dark as it’s meant to be.

With each step into the light, your animal body will know exactly how to gently emerge, to shiver and shudder, to stretch and yawn, to crack and rise. Our animal bodies, along with all more-than-human bodies constellating and collaborating and intermingling across this wild intergalactic experiment.

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I wonder… if we really knew we were stars, would we spend so much time trying to dim another’s light? How about our own?

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Around and around and around. The cycle is the signature quality of aliveness.

Rainer Maria Rile

I continue to be humbled by the illusion of endings. Especially those that I very much *want* to end. I want so badly to see the end of certain repetitive patterns, certain inescapable relationships that resurface due to forces larger than both of us, certain life experiences I can’t seem to reach completion around. Have I learned the lesson? Have I evolved out of this chapter? Have I reached the deepest tendril of the taproot that grew this fruit so ready for the compost pile? Is it rotting yet or is that my own wrangling of a timeline I don’t understand — maybe it’s still ripe? Maybe there is more here to see? Have I softened enough?

I wonder: if I entered —this— (fill in the blank) with an eye toward how it might end, how might I tend it all the way through, knowing that inevitability is coming? If I wasn’t afraid of that, how might I honor it consciously, by greeting that conclusion now with the reverence it deserves. If the end is the beginning, might we love each other better now?

I lost several relationships this year. Did you? The cognitive dissonance, the brain hijacking, the performative activism, the self-righteous posturing, the limits of my own nervous system’s capacity, the edges of my own tolerance, the strengthening of my boundaries, the fracturing planes of reality in which people are existing arbitrated by constant, corrosive algorithmic churning. All of it and more.

The fire is still burning and I don’t know. With one brave step forward, my aim is to remember myself as starlight.

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My book begins with an old niggun (song) in Yiddish, translated to English by refrain. As my dear friend said in a voice note this weekend: As long as we’re living, we are always a point on a perfect circle. We can always return. There is always more love. There is always another chance. There is always more. As long as we’re living.

So in that honor, cheers to life, and to the return of it slowly slowly tingling in the soils of our hearts and hearths.

More from me soon, like an update on the donation for this year. Thanks for sticking around despite my hiatus! It’s been a rocky season wrangling this precious book of mine. My current goal is a complete manuscript by my birthday, my next return, february 5th.

Much much love to each of you,

Rachel