A New and Hobbitty Sort of Year

I was trying to take a nap a couple of days ago and kept getting interrupted. This is my interrupted-nap face

2016 has made us stronger, more introspective, clearer on what we will and won’t tolerate. It has been an extraodinary year–the sort of time that priestesses, like yours truly, consider initiatory. I invite you to ponder what your initiation by 2016 means and whether it was a trial by fire or an endurance trial. Both? or neither? I have been transformed this year and acknowledge that it has been one of the most passionate and intensely spiritual years of my life.

I posted this on Facebook as that social media platform filled with the grief and longing of this annus horribilus. Princess Leia was dead, after all, even though we all thought she might beat this year of death. Even she could not placate it. Nor could many of us.

But the year wasn’t all grief, was it?  For some of us it was a year of wonders, of miracles, of resurrections. Perhaps it is because I am a Monkey and it is a Monkey year. Perhaps it is because I turned sixty, and that magic and frightening number seemed to liberate me from past constrictions. Perhaps because I travelled to so many fascinating places and met–and fell in love with–so many extraordinary people. Perhaps it is all of that, plus the memories of moonlit walks, transforming affections and friends who held me upright as I wept.

There is, in my deepest self, a sense of the rightness of these times that are our times, these Tower Times. I may sometimes fancy myself a brave and foolish Hobbit in a great big world. Sometimes my Facebook posts reflect my introspection and my passionate commitment to stir the batter into a place where it can all be baked into deliciousness.  

But I am, at heart, a mountain witch-woman who honors her British roots a bit too much and loves to garden and sing and dance and love with abandon. And there’s also a bit of fey in the mix. So tell me–what will you do with this fey and fiercesome year that is to come? (with apologies to Mary Oliver)