At the end of the year, I always feel a bit as though I’m looking down the wrong end of a telescope — or, perhaps better, the right end of a kaleidoscope. The new world of the coming year is just rising into view at horizon’s edge, still blurred but sharpening with every hour that passes, and with its appearance, it changes our existing world in ways small and large.
It reminds me of those knickknacks of our childhood known as snow globes: small worlds captured and held fast in glass, although they may have moving pieces, worlds that we hold in our hands within the larger world we inhabit, at the time leading me to wonder whether we were all just global Matryoshka dolls, concentric worlds held fast in an orbit far beyond our ken.
And perception is key. The world we live in now will be the same once we cross that magic dividing line of 12:00 AM on January first, and yet it will be so very, very different. Popular culture is already fast engaged in its annual winding-down fest, producing listicles on subjects real and utterly manufactured, tallying the deaths of the famous and infamous with gleefully unseemly abandon. The media and its allegedly psychic counterparts (but perhaps I repeat myself? charlatans all) are equally hard at work on “projections” for the year to come, predictions that might better be treated as secular prayers in the service of clickbait commerce. Whether the wrap-ups or the forecast bear any relationship to reality remains to be seen.
In the meantime, unlike this year, we have much to fear from the year to come; that much is already clear. We need to marshal all of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resources to be sure that we are up to the task: bravery, to propel us upward and forward into a life of active resistance; generosity, to keep our hearts open and spirits giving, particularly to those who are more vulnerable than we; wisdom, to know how to speak and when to act.
We are between worlds, or very nearly so, bidding farewell to a year that we already have reason to know will have been better for the earth and her children than the one that awaits us only days from now. As we look through the lens that leads our line of sight toward the year to come, we can already see the storm clouds gathering around the edges, the shadows of the globe’s own atmospheric edges shielding peripheral vision from clear view.
But even in the cold dark days of deep winter when a year of uncertainty, just in the offing, moves ever closer, still we can see the light. The light transforms the whole world, turning even the darkest stormclouds into works of ethereal beauty.
The light is the gift of the spirits, it is both the vehicle and the path of illumination, the way in which wisdom is transmitted to us by the spirits, even as it is muted and transmuted for the sake and safety of our limited abilities to perceive it. And as we look down the spy glass toward the days to come, with the help of the spirits, we can put order to the ever-shifting patterns and lines as we navigate the spaces between worlds, between shadow and light.
~ Aji
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