New Year 2024

New years has always been one of my favorite celebrations. At times even the most significant marker of my entire year.

I think because it’s always been a time of rebalancing for me. Even as a child who didn’t yet understand what I was up to.

A time when the recollections of past lessons naturally merge with the dreams and aspirations I hold for what is yet to be. There’s an openness and balance that settles into my being without much effort or even intent; as if it were written into my very bones that this is just the way it is. This is just what I do.

And so it has always been both peaceful and emotional. Reassuring and prodding. It’s a moment when I instinctively pause, while I feel the latent energy running through me like electricity, for a moment free of being explicitly defined.

The ending of a cycle.

The birth of new opportunities.

The chance to reflect on lessons.

To appreciate all that’s been and all that may yet be.

So much to allow. So much to appreciate. So much to remember. So much to dream.

Year after year, there comes a breakthrough moment. One more profound and more natural than any other throughout the year, no matter how many or how great they are. A break through the illusion of time. Both to overcome it and to better appreciate it.

And each year, temporarily suspended in this beautiful in between, a predominate lesson emerges from amidst the many seemingly disjointed stories of the year past. A lesson that blows a little more fog away from the road that lay ahead. The gift that took a year to fully unwrap.

In 2023 that gift was coming to know and understand the meaning of home.

Home. The place you come from and the place you return to. The place where everything is okay. Even when it isn’t.

To some, this may seem an insignificant statement. But for me, home has held many meanings over the years. And not all were comforting, or grounded, or even safe.

Once upon a time, that word brought a sense of anxiety and fear, a place I wanted to run from, to escape, to avoid. Later, ‘home’ became a place of comfort where I could hide – from the world, from the lessons, from the monsters, from the truth.

But now, after many lessons – that took form as earthquakes and gentle nudges, breaking and mending, crashes and liftoffs alike – home has come to mean something much more profound. Much more honest. Something so simple that it runs deeper than the greatest ocean and takes me higher than an eagle soars.

Now, home represents a beautiful irony, as it’s both too complex and simple for mere words. It’s a powerful metaphor but also the most straightforward and tangible reality.

And that simplicity has saved me time and time again this past year. It has brought me back from the brink. It has been as breadcrumbs that I follow when lost and starving.

Home. The place I come from. The place I return to. The present moment. The present place. But also every moment. Every place.

Home a place of comfort and love and peace, but never at the expense of truth and transparency.

Home is remembering.

Remembering to dream.

When I spent too many days among concrete trees with asphalt beneath my feet.

Remembering to surrender.

When my ego tries to hold the reigns too tight.

Remembering my strength.

When I’ve trailed off into self deprecation and worry.

Remembering our connectedness.

When the word ‘I’ slips through my mind one too many times.

Remembering it’s all but a dream.

When the numbers and rules and walls loom too large.

Home is what I found this year, and home is what I will carry with me into the next (like the crab that I am).

Home is what I will bring to others when I can. And home is what I’ll return to time and time again.

Here’s to a new year at peace. A new year of love. A new year of learning and growing and remembering and giving and thanking. Here’s to a new year completely at Home.

Cristen Writes 2023