17. beauty

It’s the first of a new year, the dawn of 2025, and I haven’t given a single thought to my word(s) of the year. 

Normally, I have at least 3, sometimes 5, but always a bare minimum of one word that is guiding me, anchoring me, helping me return to center when I feel lost or like I’ve gone astray from my north star. 

Honestly, in 2024, I didn’t feel like I accomplished much. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I didn’t feel like I achieved much. Maybe both. As I moved through the year, I felt like I was generally moving at the pace of the slowest part of myself - not in a negative way at all, but in a connection to the awareness that there is only so much I can do, and everything that truly needs to be done, eventually gets done. 

But when I looked back at the year, I observed that there were some significant milestones.

We bought our first home, in a series of miraculous and magical synchronicities, and it is literally the material expression of what I’ve been writing in my future self journaling for the past 3+ years. 

Journeying to Ireland, I brought one of the oldest wounds in my bones and blood back to the homeland, sat with my ancestors, offered prayers to the land, and healed something nearly 300 years old in my motherline. 

Our little guy River finally started school, and after 8 years of having at least one kid at home, we officially moved into the chapter of life that is having two school age kids. 

I sat in 4 seasonal ceremonies with the mushroom, each one a doorway to deeper magic and a portal to trusting more fully in this priestess path. 

Even now, as I scan for the highlights, I notice that my mind is searching specifically for the ones that are about work, money, status, recognition - but there weren’t really any of those - and I notice that without any self-criticism (genuinely). The moments and milestones that stand out the most, the ones that were truly deep experiences (those peak moments in life in which we recognize a distinct before and after, in which we know that we are forever changed)...

They were experiences of satisfaction, gratitude, relief, expansion, homecoming, belonging, and connection. 

When I reach for the thread woven amongst them, I sense how wholly infused the most sacred moments were with beauty.

Even now as I type this, my heart-mind travels back to a little glass greenhouse yoga shala nestled amongst the pine trees under a darkening September sky. I feel the beauty of this memory with my whole being; the flickering of tens of candles and tealights reflecting on the glass ceiling, dancing with the stars above, the smell of frankincense, palo santo, and rosewater, the sounds of soul-stirring music, tea gently being poured, soft laughter, tears, or sighs, and the sense of still bodies all around me entranced by the magnitude of the beauty we wove, held by the land and each other. 

My mind's-eye travels to another moment of all-encompassing beauty: lying on rugs and sheepskin atop a bed of soft grass, surrounded by ancient stones and the widest canopy of stars I’ve ever seen, feeling the edge of life and death in my body, an ineffable embodiment of peace, and knowing - knowing to the very core of my being -  that I belong to this Earth, and that I am born of these stars. 

Sensing back to just a few weeks ago, the simplest scene of a tree strung with lights, two kids finally asleep in bed, and sitting with my lover in front of a roaring fire, drinking tea and not talking, our bodies just touching and being silent together. 

Tonight, driving home and watching the sun sinking over the horizon, painting the sky blue, orange, pink, and gold, as the fertile valley below darkened from green to purple to shadowed dark. 

My intention for 2025, my word if there is one, is beauty.

I want to tend beauty in my home, in my relationships, in the spaces I inhabit. 

I will create beauty through my words, art, heart, and altar. 

My prayer is to notice the beauty in others, and honor the beauty in myself - and to challenge myself, invite myself, guide myself into hunting, sensing, and finding the beauty in the most mundane moments - and if I cannot find it, I will make it. 

Beauty itself may not save the world, but the realization, remembrance, and restoration of beauty just might. 

May I be guided by Venus to learn and lean into beauty in the deepest sense of the word, and become so beauty-full that it spills forth from me, like cascading waves and waterfalls of subtle rainbow light, the earthy scent of lavender, and the moment of seeing the brightest falling star… 

And may the awe for the beauty of it all help me weave harmony in myself and this aching world.