Yule-New Year’s Eve and the Moon of New Beginnings
New Year’s Eve gratefuls: Another year of life. Living in the third millennium. The Jang visit. Tom’s visits. Seeing the Ancient Brother’s each week. Paul, Tom, Diane. Shadow. CBE. Shadow Mountain Home. Artemis. Lodgepoles and Aspen. A Mountain Fall. Nerve ablation. Care for prostate cancer. Ruth finishing her freshman year and beginning her sophomore year. Gabe becoming a senior in high school. Commander Joe. Mary down under. Mark the old Saudi hand. Each Snowflake, Rain Drop, photon of Sunlight that came to Shadow Mountain. Each Blade of Grass, each Leaf of Ground Cover. The Mule Deer and Elk. The Black Bears and Mountain Lions. The Squirrels: Fox, Aberts, and Pine. Chipmunks. Voles. Magpies. Ravens. Crows. Robins. Blue Jays. Canada Jays. Woodpeckers like Flickers and Hairy and Downy. Each Rock of each Mountain. Each Mountain like Shadow, Black, Conifer, Berman, Berrigan. Each Mountain Stream like Maxwell Creek, Blue Creek, North Turkey Creek, Bear Creek. Conifer, Evergreen, Pine, Bailey. And our poor benighted government ravaged by fear, greed, and lust.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Each day of 2025
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress
Week Kavannah: Gevurah strength, discipline
Creating Space: “Gevurah is the strength to create space and to hold space… it’s what helps us nurture our passions.” — Renee Fishman
Tarot: Doing a Celtic Cross spread for the New Year
One brief shining: The pregnant Mule Doe or Elk Cow will not celebrate a new year since time flows for them in seasons of plenty and seasons when food hides from them; the Mountain Streams know only flow or freeze, the Aspens gave up their leaves as they do, while the Lodgepoles did not; the Mountains stay steady, tall, varied while losing, slowly, their essence to Water, Wind, and Fire.
Time divided into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, millennia, eras, epochs. A mental construct made by us bipedals who make a category mistake, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and imagine those divisions to be real. They are not.
No December. No New Year. Except for our need to name what we experience as the passage of time. Oh, by now, we do not question it. I mean the ball will drop in Time’s Square after all. The calendars of 2025 will go in the dust bin, while new planners, calendars, charts pretend the days have names and the months, too.
Yet you and I know the truth, don’t we? We exist for a moment, a mayfly moment. Life begins, then ends. Stars are born and then die. Planets whirl around them until they don’t. All this fussing and mussing around what happens in a life, wasted effort.
We blink on, we blink off. If we’re lucky, we experience other constructs like love and justice and joy and grief and despair, experiencing them all among others sharing this wondrous, inexplicable momentum gifted to us.
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?