In the heart of winter in New England, it’s easy to fall into a habit of time traveling. I can spend hours in seed catalogs, or online travel planning, or lost in my own far-flung thoughts – anything to skip over the grey, cold here and now.

This season I’m aiming to skip ahead a little less, even when the here and now is wintry. Instead of screen time to start the day, I’ve been sitting still with my morning tea. Even a minute of quiet un-plugged-ness feels like forever, which is kind of the point. One day this week a sneaky early morning sunbeam pierced the clouds and lit up my tabletop with the most beautiful golden light…. And then faded away, all in the blink of an eye.

Dear ones, it’s hard to sit still, especially in the cold and the dark. But if we scroll past the clouds, we miss the sunbeams too.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

             – T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

When I first read these lines from Eliot, they seemed so familiar… then I realized it’s because of the late-90’s anthem, “Closing Time,” for which I apologize, because now you will be humming it all day.

It’s the turn of the year and the turn of a professional season for me, and even my big potted fig plant is getting in on the act, sprouting a new leaf for the first time in forever. I cannot count the number of times in recent weeks that I’ve fielded the question, “So, what’s next?”

Friends, the companion to even the most welcome and well-planned ending is discomfort, which tends to pull us ever more quickly into the Next. And truth be told, some parts of life don’t wait – sometimes we need to keep moving right along.

But dear ones, if we can, where we can, 

Let’s make a proper end.

Pause. Reflect. Observe. Be. 

Gather ourselves together.

Ready for the next beginning.

Happy new year, dear friends! Today I am re-posting an updated version of a Honeybee classic – the new year’s flip. Wishing you all a joyful, thriving year to come.

Like many people, my new year reflections used to be full of “should’ves”. I would reflect on prior resolutions, and end up focusing solely on the things left over – work un-done, trips un-taken, fitness goals un-attained.

Then, a few years ago, I tried flipping this process around. I spent an hour reviewing my calendar from the past twelve months, noting all of the things I was glad to have done. Some entries – family reunions, long-anticipated vacations, big professional events – naturally were already top of mind. But what surprised me were the smaller moments that jumped out – afternoon tea with a long-lost friend, a great movie during a rained-out holiday, a blank space on the calendar that was actually filled with a blissful autumn hike. Even more surprising were the vital elements of the year that did not really meet the definition of “highlights” – challenges that were unplanned and often unwelcome, the ones that required hard work, or deep reflection, or active presence.

After reviewing all of these aspects, the list of un-dones that used to loom so large naturally shrank into its proper proportion. And when I turned to the fresh new calendar for the coming year, instead of stuffing every single day to the brim with pre-commitments, I intentionally tried to leave a bit more space for that tea, or movie, or hike, or time with a thorny problem and my own thoughts and feelings 

Dear friends, I wish you a spacious year, with room for all the fullness of life.

And now we welcome the new year,

full of things that have never been.
— RM Rilke

Dear friends, as we near the end of the year, the concept of liminality is on my mind. I’m reposting a streamlined & revised version of a reflection from 2020 here, as it is echoing for me now.

One of my favorite words from divinity school is “liminality” – it’s a description of the betwixt-and-between, the neither-here-nor-there. The gap between life and death is liminal space. The pause before the chorus Good Vibrations is a liminal space. The end of a calendar year, or a season of life, is a liminal space.

There are just three rules to this in-between-ness, as far as I can tell.

First, we’re not allowed to stay. By definition, liminal spaces are not permanent.

Second, we can’t go backwards. Only through.

Third, in the liminality, edges are blurred, and boundaries are stretched.

Impossible things become possible.

What could be?

Dear ones, today marks the solstice.

May knowing the darkness

help us celebrate the light.

Brighter and brighter from here.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

     – Wendell Berry