As we’re getting down to the last few scraps of 2025, it’s probably a good time to do a little bit of reflecting on what this past year has been like.
Speaking from the perspective of my own emotional recovery – my own spiritual healing – the work’s been pretty difficult, and at times, it’s just been downright exhausting.
But there’s one thing I’ve learned these last many years, and that is, that when you plow deep, you’re going to hit some big stones. It takes a lot to dig them out, but when you do, buried beneath them, you can usually find some pretty good, rich, fertile soil. And that’s definitely been the case this year…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
I picked up a few requests over the holiday, so I’m out in the garage, cutting some Cherry and Butternut blanks, and getting to work on the initial steps of bringing an antique handaxe back to life.
The heater’s finally taken the edge off the chill, and the workshop’s warm and welcoming; it’s the perfect day to be out here with my tools, enjoying the space that inevitably opens up after the blissful chaos of the annual celebrations.
I’m reminded, in the silence of this space, of the feeling of sitting on the beach when the waves have withdrawn. There’s an openness to it; and a deep and palpable grace that only comes from the knowing and accepting of its impermanence…
It’s the day after Thanksgiving. I stepped out onto the front porch at 4:30 this morning to catch a few breaths, and noticed Orion, prominent in the West – undaunted despite the orange glow of a streetlight in front of our house.
I’d already been up for a couple of hours, but the sky was incredibly clear, so I stood outside a little bit longer, then went back in to brew a pot of coffee.
Now it’s a few hours later, and I’m hip-deep into three big kettles of soup stock.
It’s a known fact in certain circles, that I plan on making soup stock every year on the day after Thanksgiving. The family pitches in with turkey carcasses, and my wife and I scrounge up every mushroom stem, onion skin, and vegetable scrap that isn’t composter-worthy. I also collect the juice from most of the meat that I cook, and strain it into ice cube trays.
Each year, preferably on this date, the entire mess goes into as many kettles as necessary, and what follows is a process that’s best described as equal parts alchemy and chaos.
When it’s simmered long enough, I strain everything into a single kettle, and render it down to somewhere between two and three gallons.
The ingredients vary from year to year, so it’s always a mystery until it’s done.
My wife affords me plenty of space, which is either deep consideration or a keenly honed sense of danger on her part. Truth be told, it’s probably a little of both. The first time I cooked in our kitchen, she took one look at my mandala of spices and oils, and an army of bowls filled with various ingredients – all laid out in the order in which I’d add them – smiled, and said, “I’m just going to walk away now…”
It’s been years since then, but as I write this, I’m thinking the exact same thing:
Amongst the things that get passed down to us from our families – the things that continue to support us, like family traditions or pictures or stories, heirlooms like China, wooden spoons, or upholstered rocking chairs, there are other things that can continue to structure our lives, like fear, shame, and guilt, and some of the darker, more intense stuff like hypervigilance, codependence, or toxic self-reliance.
When you’re raised with dysfunctionality, you learn very quickly how to read the territory. You learn to check the temperature of the air around you. You look for changes in expressions, changes in tones of voice… the slightest clue can give you a read on the environment.
And you learn how to adapt, how to adopt certain behaviors like people pleasing or hiding, never speaking your own opinion but constantly copping to the opinions of others. Or you learn how to constantly challenge authority, to yell back in order to make yourself bigger, so that the threat becomes less.
That was a favorite tactic of mine for many, many years.
These patterns provide a sense of structure and carry us through difficult situations. They can cause us to pick certain types of romantic partners, or repetitive dead-end jobs. They can drive us into reckless spending or self-destructive lifestyles.
Left unchecked, these things can continue to shape the way we live our lives. And so, in their own way, they, too, become family traditions…
…and at this time of the year, when we see the trees that are either bare or on their way there and the leaves on the ground, it’s easy to reflect on those things that have fallen away from our own lives. Some we’ve given up willingly – others have been taken away from us by the strong winds of change: friends who’ve passed through our lives who are no longer there, family members we no longer see or maybe who have died, places we’ve gone, things we believed, ways we’ve acted.
All these things that have come and gone.
Another metaphor that’s reflected upon this time of the year is that of the harvest – the things that we collect, the things that we bring in and fill our cupboards with that nourish us through the long, cold winter.
And while it’s easy to look at that side of it, there is another side to the idea of the harvest, and that’s the things that get left behind. Not only the obvious – the seeds that’ve fallen from the plants, but also the stems and the dying leaves and decaying roots. All those things that once supported the fruits and the vegetables that we’ve harvested, but now get left behind to die and to rot – to get mixed in with the soil to begin to support those seeds that have fallen…
There was always something that kept me just on the edge of it. I always felt like I never quite fit in…because the truth of the matter was, I didn’t. But I didn’t know that was because Something much larger than myself was looking out for me. In my own despair, I saw myself as always being just a little out of touch…
Sometimes in this work, we’re not aware of just how strong we really are; nor will we ever be aware of that strength unless we’re called upon to use it.
Other times, we claim strength – we claim power – that isn’t really there. And it’s brittle. And it’s arrogant. And it shatters at the first sign of difficulty.
Whichever the case, we’ll have a clearer perspective based upon how we react in moments of being tested…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about healing, about manifestation, and about clarity.
One of the things that my wife and I often talk about as being a highlight in our lives is the opportunity that we have to gather with our community once a month for ceremony.
We did that this past weekend. And as things usually go, I got out there about an hour before hand and took some time to walk the yard and pray a little bit, to meditate, and to get things ready. While I was out there, I was greeted by absolutely piercing sunlight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And with the pristine quality of the light and the openness of the sky, I knew that the intention for our ceremony would be clarity.
Those of us who’ve had a challenging upbringing because we were raised in emotionally turbulent households – maybe with alcoholism or some other form of dysfunctionality, often pray for sanity. But the truth of the matter is, we don’t really know what sanity is. We’ve never really had a good example of it; or perhaps the few examples we have had of it have been fleeting at best.
But we do know what clarity is. It occurs every once in a while. We get to see our wound. Get to see the motivations behind our triggers. Get some insight as to why we act the way we do…
When we gather together in our circles, it’s quite common that people will begin to talk about initiation and the transformations that take place in our lives. And inevitably, one of the metaphors that comes up again and again is that of the butterfly or the moth; creatures that start their lives as one form, go through a huge transformation, and emerge on the other side as something completely different – almost unrelated to the thing that they were before…
I don’t know if the caterpillar envisions the butterfly when it crawls into the cocoon, but it does seem that there is some intangible force that drives the whole thing – that guides the process…
When you intentionally enter into space, into silence; and you sit with it, one of the things that begins to happen is that all those things that we keep buried down beneath the crushing weight – the purposely assumed crushing weight – of all the noise and activity in our lives, without any of that there, those things begin to stir. And if we really sit with the silence, they can come up.
Even the mind is going to turn against us. The Monkey Mind starts to chatter, to jam as much stuff, disconnected thoughts, whatever, between us and that silence. But eventually, if you can get beyond it, and you can really begin to work at it – to slip into the silence, those things move. We can find ourselves experiencing old body memories, somatic releases, emotional memories.
And that’s the other thing silence will do for us. It can act as a container. It can act as a vessel. And so those things that now have room to move, and to come up, now, because we’ve eliminated all the external noise – all of the external static – they have room to come out.
Bonja the Bodger 