Reflecting and Resolving
2017 was a lot.
It was filled with big, magical, unexpected things, grand and terrible awful things, beautiful, graceful human things, many many unseen unknown, no could possibly guess that all this is happening to me things.
It was tough. Yet it was beautiful. It was filled with unexplainable attacks on humanity, but it was also filled with insane displays of unity and community.
It was lonely, isolating, confusing and tiring, yet it was soul-tending, connecting, and things we never told anyone before communicating.
I’ve personally learned more about how I love and how I live, this year more than most. At many times, it was in stark definition, in moments and places where I found I did not belong.
But in that unbelonging, I found myself necessary to be there, because as we continue to sift ourselves out into similar and same groups, we lose a sense of our edges, our differences, the textures that have shaped us, the spaces we fill.
We lose a sense of wonder, because the world then feels so small and conquered, or constricting.
I have felt so much more deeply the levels of brokenness in everyone, including myself. And how we hide from it, covering it up with titles, numbing it with things and shallow relationships. How we want so desperately to appear busy and important, yet all we want is to be invited, to be important, to be known, to be missed, adored.
I have seen how so many see this as well but are scared to acknowledge it, or maybe to let it show. Because people can suck. They can use your honesty against you, they can leave you out so that they feel more important, more in control. They can be mean and know that they are, because they too are broken, and living is hard.
I know that resolutions result in eye rolls, because what is time really and is a new year really a new start. Why not start at any time?
But I think it’s friggin beautiful, that people want to be better, to try harder. Why not have an excuse, permission, a moment of yearly grace to say, Okay, this year, we will be better.
This year, I will try, to be more available, even to myself.
To let myself be generous, despite cynicism.
To be unrelentingly true to myself.
Happy new year, friends.
I think 2018 is going to be a good one.
