Some people will love you beyond all rational thought
and other learnings from 2024
Hello dear friends and readers,
I haven’t felt like myself in a few weeks, and it’s because the holidays bring out the absurdity of the world, at least from my perspective. We are told to be joyful and spend money on trips and gifts while a genocide goes on in Palestine with impunity and disappeared activists in my country are ignored by most of the population. The cognitive dissonance necessary to go on with each day and its tasks is enough to make someone go crazy.
Is this how you feel, too? If so, how have you been coping?
I try whenever I can to bring my focus back to what is personal and present. These are the things I can control. These are the things that raise my energy. Lately, I’ve been following dance workouts by a Caribbean instructor named Tara. Tara has excellent music taste and knows a number of complex Latin moves. Autre côté, she says, and I translate in my head: other side.
After reflecting on what I can offer you in this month of January, I thought the best thing to give is what has been most healing for me to write. In an afternoon of clarity and peace, I wrote down the things I’ve learned in 2024 and the things I want to nurture in the new year. The fruits and its seeds to nurture a soul.
Fruits: lessons learned in 2024
Writing and poetry makes me happy and brings me to a childlike place of excitement, curiosity, and awe.
I don’t need to be a hero. I don’t need to save the world. The world continues on regardless, and I can be proud of the moments of enlightenment I participated in, those moments where one or more of us felt infinite.
Some people will love you through distance, through tragedy, and through all rational thought. Find the people you love in this way, and you’ll be set for almost anything.
Life can turn around in just a month. Therapy can take months to feel any different, but you might feel completely changed once you do. This is a lesson applicable to any complex societal change as well; results stay minimal for an excruciating amount of time before we can see a league of differences.
The wind whispers agreement. Listen to the trees.
It is okay to not want any more friends or people. It is okay to be in solitude.
Seeds: to manifest in 2025
A publishing deal for my poetry book Rivers First Fall, and the publication of my individual poems, essays, and stories in a variety of places so they can reach the right people who need to read them.
Service at my own pace, in ways that feed my soul (reading groups, counseling).
Deeper commitment to community based on values of integrity, trust, love and kinship — with all of life.
Nurture my mental health, as in the careful timekeeping of my soul.
More moments with the forest, the mountains, the rivers and ocean. More moments with alive stillness in sacred nature.
To follow my instincts where they lead me.
