Here we are again, friends.

Here, at the end of another year and in the dead of winter, at an emptying out point of the year when we enjoy the longest periods of darkness.

This will not be a motivational “New Year” email, but a deeply reflective and personal one. The turning of a page is also just another day, and it is just another week a lot like any other. But after the year I have had, it deserves some acknowledgement and recognition, especially as I evolve my own voice in the world in the coming year.

I’ve been inclined to say “good riddance” or “fuck right off” to 2024.

But the wiser part of me knows I need to say, “thank you.”

This year came with nothing easy for me. I felt like Sisyphus, pushing and reaching and searching but getting crushed over and over again until everything in me gave out. It was excruciating in ways I will not and could not possibly go into here.

But there was beauty, also.

There was the rugged coast of Shelter Cove. There were deep reconnections with beloved humans. There was the talk I gave to the Jungian Society in New Mexico on American individualism and loneliness, and the three hour presentation I gave to the Bay Area Association of Psychological Type on the cultural loss of belonging. And there was a miraculously completed 70-page dissertation proposal. There were many incredible clients served, and then . . . through it and underneath and on top of it all . . . there was a profound evolution in my relationship with my body, my instincts, my inner knowing.

I moved through an entire year without answers to questions of my wellbeing, feeling utterly blind and bewildered by my circumstances, and at every turn more and more questions. This enduring state of looking and not finding—while feeling like an answer was somehow necessary for survival—required me to engage a deeper and more universal truth. This kind of truth is unshakeable because it is free . . . free from expectation, excuses, and shame; free from perceived limitations and obligations; free from habitual thinking and, most importantly, free from perfection and outcomes.

And it is very hard won.

The destabilizing forces we endure serve as reminder that uncertainty is the nature of human incarnation. This is ever more the case as the body of our earth becomes as sick as our own. The sooner we can soften into a paradigm of uncertainty as reality, the sooner we can loosen our grip on these disappearing edges and find something perhaps less solid but infinitely more stabilizing.

My tight fists fought for everything I was desperately terrified to lose this year as I felt it all slipping from my fingers in astonishing disbelief.

As the earth shattered beneath my body every night, the world of being eventually—after much torment—opened me up to an immense weightless universe where a perpetual falling sensation finally gave way to an eerie, buoyant spaciousness.

Profound waves of grief washed over me, and continue to wash over me, but at some point they stopped drowning me. The sea water cleared from my lungs as they still rained from my eyes.

In 2024, decades moved through me. Eons of time and space.

In death after death, a new animism came into my body, my psyche, my heart.

My immense and habitual bracing against life and all its feelings had to succumb to each chasm as it opened, yawned, and swallowed me. I had to learn how to turn the lights on, how to row a dinghy down class IV rapids, how to be with the darkest, most painful, most wretched parts of me.

I had to be defeated, to give in to a helplessness I could not tolerate. I had to fight until there was nothing left in me but what resides underneath a worn-out ego. I slayed the dragon but the dragon ate me. Flesh and bone. Bitter and sweet.

I learned that resistance is a profound kind of suffering. And often a silent one.

Underneath the disappointment with my body—a mortifying betrayal—I encountered lifetimes of my own disappointment story. Tender hope crushed and burned to ash; ash used to bury future hopes.

Until one day, on a cliff above the rugged wildness of the Lost Coast, I had a vision. I saw myself making snow angels in the ashes. I felt a release of something important. My heart clicked into my chest. My ribcage softened and strengthened around her.

I learned that hope is not dangerous but vital to the survival of all of humanity, not least of all my own psyche. I learned that hope is sacred, more so than love or compassion. Hope is a radical practice of existing in more than the possibilities we are conditioned to imagine. Hope is maturity. It is not saccharine and naïve but substantial, consequential, divine.

Hope is vision while expectation is blindness.

Hope is the infinite and emergent nature of psyche. Without hope, we are dead heaps of biological cells moving mechanically through life as if it were a chore.

On hope, Nick Cave writes, “Hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.”

Most of all I learned that sometimes, some of us must encounter a willingness to die in order to fully live.

I know that, despite the inevitable habits, wounds, and karma, I will never be the same.

And thank goddess for that.

So, thank you, 2024. You stripped me bare, burned away my flesh, dissolved my mind, and shook loose whatever I thought I had left. You showed me what is eternal, what is temporal, and I wearily, humbly, curiously step forward. Exhausted but alive.

A Phoenix, burst into flames, then ash, then bearing its wings again. All of us.

I know this chapter is not over, that there is more. And I will certainly fail. I will collapse. I will disappoint myself and others. I will create chaos I intended on avoiding. I will struggle. I will curse the gods. I will forget all of this, again and again.

But I will finally have my heart.

And that is indestructible.

Yours Truly,

Erika