New Year’s Eve was often a sad day for me. Christmas was over. Another year was over and here I was, despite the resolutions and best intentions of a year ago, unchanged – the same confused and awkward minion of the world surviving into another year of longing to rise while tethering myself to the ground. If only I could lose weight, make more money, have more time to write, go to the beach more often … they sounded like good intentions but came with a rotten centre of negativity and self-doubt. Make more money? Not likely with your questionable skills. Go to the beach more often? Who do you think you are. More time to write? What for? Who needs what you have to say?

Not this year. 2021 is being heralded as the worst year ever, a year of pandemic protocols and isolation and death, of cancelled trips and lost jobs and squashed dreams, of upheaval and uncertainty, leading many to sum up the past 365 days in two words: good riddance. But for me, 2021 has been the best year yet. There was misery and loss: I have lost dear family and friends to sudden deaths for which I could not gather to mourn. I have watched the world around me descend into chaos and bitterness, listened as dear friends on varying sides of the vaccine debate tear into each other, respect and empathy gone in a flood of frustration and fear.  But this was the year I learned to listen to who I really am, not the sack of flesh that carries me or the brain claiming to run my show, but me – the signal I am, the energy, the essence of my existence and within it, the talents, purposes and visions for life that I have carried since I was conceived. COVID has called us all to a new way of doing things as individuals, communities, governments and global entities, and the backlash against any form of evolution or personal ownership at first frightened me, then it angered me. Once I stopped, breathed, and started taking my anger back, using it as fire to light my own exploration, COVID became not an obstacle, not an enemy, not a conspiracy, but an invitation. Accepting that invitation has brought me closer to myself and brightened my life in ways I never thought possible. 2021 is the year that forced me to be with myself, and like a surly child in detention I lashed out at first, blamed protocols and governments for restricting my choices, and felt myself sinking into a fog of who cares and nothing matters. Then I let go. If nothing matters, why worry? If no one cares, what am I fighting for or against? Without the attitude of protectionism, without an enemy, there was only space – dark, quiet, mysterious, like a lost locked room of a house suddenly discovered and open. And within, once I dared to enter, was everything I need to create the life I want. It was unlimited capacity to imagine and manifest, courage to be, talents to do, it was everywhere and everything. It was home. I just needed to know it was there, trust in its power, learn to listen, and reconnect the pathways to lead it rom the locked room into the world.

I didn’t need to travel the world, take courses, or practice for hours to someone else’s standards. I needed to set my own course, trust my choices, and value myself enough to make my life worth the time and trust. I needed to stop, turn inward and heal. And 2021 was the perfect time to do it.

Trust your gut has never been more important in this ‘information’ era where facts blur with the fiction and accountability is smothered by the clamour for entertainment. A nightly Mana card has become part of my routine, something to ponder while drifting off to sleep that takes me to a corner I don’t want to visit so I can learn and choose differently, or something to celebrate the joy of living a life fed by internal awareness rather than external manipulation. Starting Christmas Day, I drew a triple crown of guides in my journey: Pele, Fire Goddess of Earth, heralder of upheaval; Laka, Goddess of Hula, sign of inspiration and Ho’oponopono, a ritual for restoring harmonious relationships, to set right.

Pele takes no prisoners; it’s tackling everything I believe, why I believe it, who I hold close and who and what I need to release. It is freeing, terrifying and exhausting to examine every memento and choice, reflect on it, feel its energy, and choose to keep or discard it.  It’s like plunging off a cliff deep into the cluttered closets and overworked brain cells fighting to maintain the only reality I remember, but there is no better way to create space.  Shirts and dreams, receipts and relationships, cluttered drawers and overworked brain cells … all can serve to fuel our passions, or can bury us in busy work that mirrors productivity. It continues to amaze me how much of my life I simply hand over to rote and oh, well, whatever rather than actively choose.

But, as I said, it’s exhausting. Laka reminds me to dream, to seek and soothe myself in those things and places and relationships that inspire me. My writing calls me to do that and to allow it, I’ve had to let go of the belief that writing is work, worth only the money it earns, worth time only when I produce a tangible commodity that someone else will buy. My relationship with my writing was dysfunctional, emotionally abusive, begging for divorce. I used it only to earn me money so I could travel and get away from it, take a vacation from it rather than with it. I gave it nothing and demanded everything and when it protested, I raged at it, starved it, pointed to the door and demanded it leave me alone.

And there is Ho’oponopono, a call to healing those dysfunctional relationships, intimate or casual, external or internal. My relationship with my writing was carried inside but the fury and dysfunction spilled out into other relationships, harming the most the one closest to us both, the one who sought to reunite us. But as in any relationship, healing can only come from within those directly involved. I alone could allow the desire to write, the gratitude to write, the space for writing in my life. To do that has been to touch fears long-buried of failure and being lost. Creation thrives in the unknown and is born from chaos. It’s unpredictable and messy, things I learned  were to be avoided at all cost. But that’s what lights me up inside – the thrill of the unknown, the grand experiments where you test by doing and embrace the journey of discovery regardless of the outcome, the doing something that frightens me just because I can. Yet I easily forget and spiral inward, feel my world grow dark and small. Until the next Mana card, the next conversation with a trusted fellow explorer, the next time I sit in front of my screen and invite the words to come.

So I await the new year this year with an enthusiastic hope, with a passion for making this a year of leaps and plunges, of clearing out and creating new, of learning even more about myself and my place in a world that is changing rapidly and fighting to stay the same.  I have myself to thank for awakening and allowing this journey. I have the many wise and wonderful people in my life to thank for their examples, their stories, their energy and truths. And I have the circumstances that beg for ‘good riddance’ to thank as well, for forcing my butt to stay home and my journey to spiral inward where it was needed. Now, it is time to spiral back outward. Look out 2022.

Wishing you a continued magnificent journey. See you again soon.