Phantasmic beginnings everywhere you look
Or why a new year is not a new opportunity
The silences of the past weeks and months, have created a lot of space for a lot of grief for me personally and the temptation to jump onto the whole ‘new year - new you’ train can be really difficult to ignore.
Isn’t it a beautiful tale of promise: a passage, something new, and all the things we wish to go away, or all the things that are holding us back… pooof… gone.
New beginnings.
But here is the thing, loves, this tingling feeling you feel when you read this? The beautiful pull and small pang of self-belief and confidence you experience when you see the beautiful new-year memes since Jan 1st, they are all here for you on any given day. The energy set free by a new beginning is available every single day, every single hour, every single minute of every waking moment and beyond.
You do not need the formal passage of a year, a Saturn transit, a birthday or even a full moon (yes, my fellow witches) to start or renew.
Certainly, for the ones of us who are more aligned with the natural rhythms of nature around us and tuned into the cycle of the seasons, there are moments that will help with the renewal if you can time it well, but these elements come to us form the natural world and not from an artificially calculated moment. They come from the ebb and flow of the natural cycle of life, of growing and dying. Yes, dying, ending, unbecoming.
So, why does the New Year not allow us for a new beginning then?
Because it is in the middle of winter (at least for me in Europe). But also because the earth energy is slow, it is rooted, anchored deep within its own center. There is little to no outgoing energy, there is just condensation, concentration and restful becoming. The land outside here is still full of snow, and humid rain in the lower regions. It is cool at night and inhospitable to be outside. The sparkle of December has left the hills and mountains, and even on sunny days, we are in the month of the ice queen and the holding deep of the Cailleach, of Holda, Frau Holle.
Renewal? It’s a mirage. A false promise of a society that has great difficulty to understand the wisdom in resting, in taking the time to be and stay still, in contemplation and inner stillness.
Why is that?
Because very simply put: we never learn how to end something before begninngin anew.
The current emphasis on new beginnings, and new ideas, new plans and decision making, drawing your oracles for the year ahead, for setting intention and all of the newly marketed new age practices, fails to see that before we can do that, we need to accept the ending of things. The letting go and the dying of all life.
With no concept of how to bring things to a good, and natural end, how are we ever to start anything well?
For some of us beginnings are easy. We explore what it means to start something, find power in it and excitement. It’s the joy of youth running freely until your heart is ready to burst out of your chest.
But ending things, cutting cords (and burning some bridges, if you need to), laying to rest, praying over the bones of the dead, are the work of the mature women, of the early grandmothers and elders. It is a sacred function that is all but lost in modern western society and even the new movements of feminism and female theology and spirituality have little space for these concepts.
We need to learn how to end things completely new. Without anger and resentment or blame for things that may not have developed as we wished or not worked out as wanted.
I am personally very bad at endings, for very specific reasons that my psyché is quite clear on. Over the years, I have managed to learn how to end things without any part of blame or negativity, but after the late three months of 2024 have brought the end of one of my dearest projects in all of my life (I had a few ending this way), I am not faced with the reality that I probably should have ended it much sooner. That the loss of my personal Temple should probably have happened much earlier, and that coming to terms with it was an initiation in itself.
The next weeks of unwinding this particular story will tell.
For now, take these words as an encouragement to find the things in your life that do need a proper ending. A ‘The End.’ at the last page will do. An intentional way of saying: “This is as far as I can carry this. This is where I will choose to end this.”
And then let it go.
The renewal is waiting right behind the next corner.
On February 1st, the first shoots of new energies will move under your feet. Will warm the deeply burrowed roots of trees and plants, where everything was stored away for a new cycle, new life and new growth. It will start slowly, and outside of the apparent signes. Below everything else.
So, find your endings. Make them sacred. Make them soft. Make them graceful.
Find them in your beautiful suspended hesitation, and the bitter sweet smiles of parting, and the deep, animal-like sobs of heart shattering grief.
Until all your current endings have been seen and you feel empty.
Empty of all possibility of moving forward.
Then… at last, the new beginning will find you.
Full of promise. Full of divine purpose.
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