The yearly rituals of going through all of my things, letting go of what no longer serves me;

reflecting on the enormous challenges this year has brought in the world and in so many of our lives.

As always, I’ve spent the past few weeks doing my year end rituals, processes and chores.  Around the Solstice I began my annual cycle of going through everything I own: clothes, files, papers, collections of art materials, all the “things” that gather on my altars and in my cupboards through the year. In the process I rediscover bits and pieces I’ve forgotten that I’d squirreled away for purposes I no longer remember.  It’s always a time of re-considering, releasing, recycling and pitching. A time of letting go of whatever has lost its significance for me. 

In the process, I am making empty spaces for newness to come in. In some places its quite literal. I empty my monthly financial files into a box of envelopes that I then use for gathering together the information needed to do my taxes. This leaves my file drawer ready for all the papers, notes, bills, statements and receipts that will begin to gather again in the New Year.

In other ways, it is a metaphoric process; contact magic. I feel deeply the “airing out” and opening up of space within me as, outside and around me, I move things out and rearrange what remains. Always there is reflection and coming to closure on the year that’s been. Often that’s a wordless process that I feel rippling within me.

Last year and this year there were words that came with those reflections.  And, for the second year in a row, I chose to write those reflections as a Solstice letter. A letter to enclose with my annual Solstice/New Year card to my friends, family and clients.                                    

“Dear and Precious Ones,

As each year winds down, I always wonder whether or not Spirit/the Grandmothers will gift and bless me with a vision for a new Solstice/New Year’s card. I never “expect” one, but staying ever open to receiving the inspiration, I’ve actually been given a new card every year since 1985. 

This 19th card (both the figure and the words) came all-of-a-piece one evening in the middle of this year’s birthday retreat. I was pulled to the computer and my pens just as I awakened from one of the endless naps I seemed to be taking during that 10-day time of hibernation.

At first, I was surprised by the intensity of this card’s message. It struck me as a rather odd “greeting” to be sending in a “Holiday season.” Yet as I sat with it for a day or two, honing the final spatial layout of it, I understood that it was incredibly appropriate after all.

It’s been such an extraordinarily intensely charged year, in the world around us and, as well, in the lives of almost everyone I know and hold dear. With the war-mongering, absolute-power hungry, irrational paranoiacs now at the helm, we are living in a “Through-the-looking-glass” world of disinformation and escalating spirals of lunacy and chaos. (Regardless of how consciously tuned-in to or tuned-out of it one chooses to be.)

In the nearer landscapes of so many of our personal lives, it’s also been a year of turbulent upheaval, enormous challenge and much loss of a sense of control.  Life threatening illnesses, health challenges, deaths, geographic moves, major life changes (of both positive and devastating sorts) have careened through the lives of my friends, family, and clients.  Even my own usually quiet life went through a period of some notable turmoil, (When I had to face giving up having this idyllic Eden to myself. To accept having a new family living full time in the very close by and, before then, essentially empty “Big House.”)

Over and over and over, we all seem to be having to learn to live with dislocation, extreme uneasiness and the sense of being without much real control over what’s unfolding. The message from Spirit is clear. Surrendering into these feelings of helpless overwhelm, experiencing them deeply, fully in our bodies/beings will lead us into our own center. Only from there can a knowing emerge of what/where from here is right action for our own selves in the moment.

To live in the thinnest slice of now that we can define, to take extravagantly gentle care of our precious selves is to do what we can to hold ourselves safe through such turbulent times. Finding inner safety and balance in precarious times is what allows us to act from our deepest wisdom rather than from a frantic panic to just “do something!” in order to feel “empowered.”

Sitting in witness with so much upheaval all year has repeatedly left me feeling enormous exhaustion. An even greater hunger for rest and stillness than ever before. Tending to this exhaustion called me into taking a 5-or 6- day time-out every month since April. (In addition to my annual 10-day retreat in November.)  And, as the year progressed, these times of being unplugged from contact were more and more about lots of sleep, lots of naps; less and less about pottering with house and garden projects. 

The slowing down from my already slowed down lifestyle seemed essential to making it through this year that’s flowed by in an eye-blink of roaring intensity.  I’ve become evermore the quintessential poster-girl for that wonderful Spanish proverb” How beautiful it is to do nothing and to rest afterward!” (In between naps!)

All these sacred acts of resting have combined with and been intensified by some rather amazing bodywork I’ve been doing with a Feldenkrais-trained healer. The combination has begun to free some new levels of creative energy in me: Writing two “from-the-depths-of-my being” pieces for my web site every month. Further fine-tuning the site itself. And, most recently, after a 5 or 6 year fallow season, mid-wifing a new large fiber mask. 

Helping this new Spirit Mother Totem (She Who Shelters the Sorrows of Women) get herself born into being is such an electrifying process! It’s amazing how completely I’d forgotten just how miraculous this mask mid-wifing process has always been. It astonishes me how much presence the collection of simple bits of crocheted parts-of-a-face have. How utterly out-of-my-control the whole emergence is. How taken over by something larger than myself I feel. How much space She takes up in my cottage/studio as she layers herself into reality.

The writing always writes me through intense and unexpected emotional journeys, sometimes about the content and sometimes about just the actual process of writing itself. The Spirit Mothers have similarly pushed me through various tight spaces as they’ve each, over the past 26 years, birthed themselves using me as their doorway-into-being. The creative process is for me always an intense, welcomed, sometimes anguishing and sometimes utterly joyful process of being drawn into the vortex. There I am being thrown out of control, being swept into and through unpredictable stretches of helpless, powerless overwhelm. In the end, something of substance and wonder is born of the willing surrender to that process.

Holding this as my metaphor helps me to live with an abiding conviction that all the out-of-control upheaval, chaos and turmoil we are all going through may well be part of a larger, intense, forcing, creative process. A time of laboring to birth something new into our lives and onto the planet. Something as yet inconceivable and implausible to us. Something that may in the end be miraculous. 

This Winter Solstice time is also always a hopeful metaphoric reminder for me.   Solstice, the moment of the greatest darkness is simultaneously the moment at which the light finally begins to be reborn. As it is in the natural world, so may it be in each and all of our lives!

P.S. Magically, the new tenants have turned out to be utterly wonderful: Sweet kindred souls with personal energies very much in keeping with the sanctuary of this Eden and, despite the increased traffic in the driveway, relatively  “invisible “ energetically!”

Originally published January 2003