A few thoughts on this momentous occasion of surviving 2025 with a tiny bit of hope that 2026 will be so much better:

What a Year it has Been

This year. We’ve been broken down to our bones. We’ve been dismantled. Our skin electric, but not in a good way, in a way that happens when there is something wrong with the circuitry and every time we open our eyes to a new day: shock, shock, shock. Our hearts. Oh, our poor hearts. How did they stay beating? (So many did not.) While we watched the emaciated child in Gaza die in the arms of his weeping mother. While the waitress who always knew our order disappeared to a country she has never even set foot in. So many of us gone. The absence larger than a dark hole in the universe. And so many new angels, too, cheering us on from the great whateverafter:

You got this.

Because we have also been: Hope. Resilience. Protest. Dancing and drumming and chanting and choosing joy, actively choosing it, which, in itself is a form of protest. This life, it’s all we have, and we will not go gently into that dark night. We will light a candle against the darkness. We will light ten million candles. We will become flame. We will create so much light that we will bring the world back into what it was meant to be, what the trees and the moss and the birds and the rocks and the ocean know it to be: a place where we are all connected; where, if one falters, we pick them up, we carry them. We are the ones history will remember. We are pages in books not yet written, each one of us a drop of ink. Look how they resisted. Look how they didn’t let the evil win. It’s hard to see it now, in the middle of. But one day, they will write stories of our love, our strength, our hope, our refusal to take a knee. No kings. We were built on that very premise, this nation of ours. And we stand our ground. By the people, for the people, and fuck anyone who thinks they can rip that from our fabric of stars and stripes. We are made of stronger stuff than that, you and I. Look, we’re not perfect. Our list of mistakes as a nation could fill a golden ballroom in the East Wing that will never get built because all of the workers have been deported and the corporations have had their payouts and nobody wants to dance in a palace built by fools.

And yet, we persist.

So. Goodbye to this year and all that it has taught us. For the lessons, we give gratitude. For the rest, well. We’re still here. Somehow. Standing or curled into a fetal position depending on the day. All of those billions of days of a year that changed us right down to our core. Now, stripped down, naked and with fresh skin, rebuilt hearts, light flowing in our veins, we step over a threshold into the new, new year.

Never forget:

We are the thing with feathers.

We are made of stardust.

We are beautiful.