Twenty twenty three.

Twenty twenty two was full of love, fun and joy and also full of conflict, discomfort and challenge. So far twenty twenty three has been the same. I expect it to continue that way. I expect it to be as I have come to expect life to be. Equal parts beautiful and painful. Equal parts ebb and flow. Sometimes exquisitely easy and other times impossibly hard.

It’s a new chapter of the same story, a new season of the same series. The themes continue, some of the storyline’s carry over, the characters are mostly the same.

It seems I’m being asked to try showing up to work without a script this time round. That’s what this season, this chapter seems to be asking of me at this point. As I’ve been feeling into, listening out for and trying to decipher what I already know about what this year will hold for me- all I’m getting is ‘nothing and that’s a good thing because you are ready, you can do knowing nothing now ’.

All of the chapters before have led to this, have been right for their time. The ones I desperately tried to write as I went along, the ones I fooled myself into believing were already written, the ones I let others lead and write for me, the ones I hid from, avoided and refused to participate in at all.

I’ve had seasons of pretending, battling, giving up, struggling, breaking, falling apart, unravelling, learning, repairing and building up the strength to test new waters and practice new ways of being in the past decade.

Now maybe, I think, I get to just show up? Without expectation, without a schedule or plan I think I need to follow, without a goal in sight, without a fight against or resistance to anything in particular. With the capacity to consistently face and hold what’s in front of me and also whatever it might bring up within me.

It feels like I’ve patched up enough of the cracks and old wounds so that they can no longer rule the roost. It feels like a year for awareness without constant acknowledgement. For embodiment without the need for explanation. For just being without having to work (and explore and figure out) so hard to be ok. Finally.

A year for resting into the space that has opened up layer by layer as I have learned to know myself and trust my inner voice. To accept who, what and how I am and to value what all of that brings. As I have met with and held the various versions of my younger, unmet, discarded self that have filled me up, shouting orders from within dark corners for years.

I’ve been in training, I’ve been building my practice, I’ve had my eye on the horizon. And now it’s like I’m looking down at my feet to see that I’ve actually been standing on the start line the whole time. It seems that, at the beginning of this new year I have made it, not to an end or to some finish line, healed and complete but to the beginning of living, of continuing to learn and grow and of course parent, from a place of feeling and knowing that I am whole just as I am.

On the beautiful, easy days and also on the days that I am consumed and overwhelmed and struggling with the parts that hurt. Because now I know how both are valid, both are required, both are perfectly acceptable, healthy and inevitable when we choose to live and experience the world with an open and sensitive heart, as I intend to continue doing.

Cheers to the New Year, to our new chapters and to reaping what we have worked really long and hard to sow