Good morning. Goodbye 2024. Hello new year.
As we plunge back into the business of life, I offer you this interview I just did with the ethereal and wise john a. powell for City Arts & Lectures. Give it a listen and learn why john says we should be talking about “fragmentation” rather than polarization, how a book about China that he found in the library as small kid led him to break with his minister father’s church, and so much more. There’s a lot of “simplicity on the other side of complexity” in this interview, and I think it might be just what we need right now.
I also offer you this, a prayer for the new year. You can find last year’s prayer, which very much still applies, here.
Prayer for 2025
May we belly laugh often. May we have many a cathartic cry.
May we fall in love with something—a person, a TV show, a tree, a poem, a possibility.
May we fall out of love with being indispensible. May we raise our hand when it is our work to do.
May we make things that please us even if they aren’t perfect. May we show these things to the world. Or not.
May we nourish people—people we know, people we don’t know. May we feed them black eyed peas and schlep their children around and offer gentle smiles on the street.
May we unabashedly admit when we are moved by things. May we write fan letters and thank you notes and pay artists when they make art that changes us.
May we spend time in graveyards and reading obituaries and filling out our advanced directives and knowing just how inevitable death is. May that shape how we live.
May we not shy away from the liminal, the transitional, the in-between, sunrises, sunsets, this is life’s most potent teaching time.
May we not overestimate the risk of being vulnerable and generous, and not underestimate the risk of being self-sufficient and rich.
May we fight tyranny and get involved locally and read less news about what’s broken and more about what works, so we can not only have a more accurate picture of the world, but be smarter about improving it.
May we have something in our lives that we never get quite right (sourdough bread, romantic relationships, a sexy cat eye) so it builds our empathy for the “never quite right” of someone else’s journey. May we all hold out naive hope that one day we will gloriously succeed.
May we know that we don’t know…what the future holds, what our teenage daughter should wear to school, what our friend is feeling, how our boss will react. May our not knowing be a place of humility and ease. May it create less harm.
May we also admit that we don’t know nearly as much as we pretend to know about tariffs or the moon or inflation. May it lead to curiosity instead of judgment.
May we walk through the world knowing we have no idea what burdens and blessings other people carry with them. May the world remind us of this at just the moment we forget.
May we learn how to act with solidarity rather than pity, especially when what befalls someone makes us think “thank god it’s not me, not my kid, not my marriage, not my town, not my country.” It could be. In some cases, it will be.
May we know that sometimes even tragedies are miracles.
May we honor our children by fighting for a public education system worthy of them, by spending time with them while our phones are in another room, by marveling in the uniqueness of their big souls in their tiny bodies.
May we honor our elders by fighting for healthcare and housing worthy of them, by really listening to them about the beauty and ache of aging, by holding their hands.
May we honor our friends with voice texts on dog walks and by prioritizing in-person time with them and pattern-keeping the long arc of their lives for them, and offering them unconditional love and loving corrections.
May we understand that aching towards healthy relationships is a spiritual practice.
May we surprise ourselves, be creatively maladjusted and weird and more and more, every single day, exactly who we actually are.
May we acknowledge our own limitations.
May we bow to the journeys that our loved ones are on and know that we can witness, and maybe accompany them, but not control them (or the path, especially when wretched).
May we let our own suffering be a portal through which we connect with the suffering of the world. May it open us up instead of closing us down.
May we play and move and play and move and play and move.
May we mark the moment even when it seems a little embarrassing, may we talk about one another’s grief out loud, may we admit how fucking hard it is sometimes to be a person at all.
May we sing and shut up, feel cozy and outraged, do less bullshit and more ritual, pay exquisite attention to what is right in front of us and make space for imagination, be and become.
May it be so.
Love the prayer, Courtney. And that photo of Stella and me really lit up and warmed another dark, cold day here in Madison! Love to all y'all from Sharon and me...
Moved to tears. So timely, helpful and important, thank you! Here we go…