my word for 2022

I felt a really slow start to this year.

I definitely started out in extreme hermit mode.

I’ve been grieving pre-pandemic life and the state of things in our world.

Tracy and I are providing around the clock care for our aging dogs, and processing a lot of stress.

I’ve been working hard and I’m tired.

I spent a lot of January feeling depleted. Then, one afternoon, I let Rocky out back. It was super cold. There was snow on the ground, but the sun was bright. I turned around and looked at my incredibly messy kitchen and thought, This is just not that big of a deal.

I realized, I could get the kitchen and in fact the whole house cleared and cleaned and sparkling in a matter of days if I simply decided to do it.

I realized, it was time to take action.

So, I’m going with the Lunar new year for 2022. January was my hibernation period, my time to gather energy and clarify my focus.

I’m starting this year on February 1.

My Word of the Year

I almost didn’t choose a guiding word this year.

Open-hearted was a big contender. Words like Ease and even Success came to mind.

But nothing seemed exactly right.

Then, that day I turned around and saw that my messy kitchen was something over which I had complete control, Tracy and I had a conversation about our house and how we keep house and how important it is that it look a certain way.

“Why does it matter?” he said. “It’s just us.”

During that conversation, I realized how deeply I value beauty.

I was reminded of a sermon I heard once about how we meet God in beauty. I sat in the church listening to that sermon and thought about important the beauty of the church was to me. Often, the hour and a half service for me was about the light moving through the richly colored stained glass and the choir singing in harmony. The pageantry. The beauty itself was the prayer.

I realized that when, because of a lack of time or energy or motivation, I allow our home to sink into a despair of dirty dishes and dust and disorder, it impacts the way I feel. Tending to our living environment is a way of showing respect to myself and the other inhabitants of our home.

There is no just us.

It’s us.

We’re important.

So I chose my word for 2022.

Daily Rituals

Honoring myself, honoring life, means developing habits and rituals that nourish and sustain me and the people around me.

It’s important to my wellbeing that I begin and end my day with some form of meditation.

It’s also important that I engage in some sort of physical movement.

I’ve been struggling with the aforementioned grief, depression and anxiety. Ritual brings balance and healing.

The more chaotic, intense, even unbelievable the outside world becomes, the more I need to rely on my inner world, my inner strength, and the rituals that anchor me.

Planners & Systems

So far this year, I’ve been intensely focused on list-making, reflection, and documentation.

I’ve always kept notebooks and diaries and journals, but I’ve never journaled this deeply and consistently. I’m writing down everything. I get that swirling homesick feeling in my solar plexus? I make a note about it. Feeling the sparkling activation in my root chakra? I write it down. Every thought. Every dream. I’m mapping it all.

I’m using two physical planners this year, A Mystics Guide to 2022 and Writual Planner.

Energy Balance

There is very little that can’t be addressed in the energetic.

This year, I am consciously embracing that fact - consciously grounding and clearing my energy, listening to my body and responding to what its saying.

When I feel the urge to get into a salt bath, I’m getting in there.

When I need to move around and hum, I’m moving around and humming.

When my body says, go to bed, that’s where I’m headed.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I saw a large bird of prey flying with something large in its talons. My heart surged. I wanted to save it, the small animal it had in its grasp. Later in the dream, the bird landed and let me take the prey. It was a small, strong black cat. It was, I realized, a baby Jaguar - half beautiful and half dangerous - and it was still very much alive.

I held it in awe.

Physical Environment

I’m trying a new approach to clearing my closets. In the past, I’ve tried to do this all at once, but pulling everything out and sorting into piles and trying things on.

This time around, I’ve put out some empty boxes. If I’m wearing something and I find myself thinking, this is really uncomfortable or I don’t like how this looks, I take it off and put it in the box. No thinking. No assessment. If it’s not working, it goes in the box.

My Work

I feel like I’ve just moved through some sort of clearinghouse period.

I lost things, things were taken from me, everything repositioned itself.

When I look at my body of painted work, I feel a fondness, a deep gratitude for everyone who has purchased work from me, and a gratitude for what I discovered during the process of painting. And I feel like I’m stepping into something new. I feel like I’m on the cusp of a whole new way of making art, of making paintings.

As I’m sharing my nonfiction writing on Patreon, I’m feeling on the cusp of change with my written work, as well.

For the past few months, I’ve been noticing that I feel like I’m waiting for something. Another shoe to drop? A big world event? Something.

It’s this everything is on hold, waiting period sort of feeling-like the way it feels when you’re counting down to a holiday or a trip.

It’s an odd, uncomfortable feeling.

Do you feel it, too?

So maybe I have been repositioned in order to navigate this thing that we’re waiting for, whatever it is.

Of course, I looked up the symbolic meaning of Jaguar: power, leadership, stealth, exotic beauty, fertility and abundance, protection, telepathy, and transformation.

2022

In my planner, there’s a Bucket List page. On one column you list what you want to achieve in this life and on the other column, you list want you wan to experience. I was looking at the page recently and realized, almost everything on my experience column involved travel.

Travel is not possible for me and Tracy at the moment, but one day, it will be again.

Things will get better.

That’s what I’m dreaming into this new year. That’s the promise I’m holding in my heart. Things will not always be as they are right now. Things will get better. Things will transform.

And I’m going to contribute to that transformation by holding the thread I hold and weaving.

My guiding word for 2022 is BEAUTY.

I hope to hold it up the way I hold a crystal up to the sunlight and see it in every dimension. The way I step out into my snowy back yard and try to capture the full moon in the sky. The way the the bird of prey lands next to me and releases the jaguar from its grip, into my hands.