Engaging AI to make December magic
Making December Magic Part 6 and an invitation to join me online to celebrate the solstice
Dear readers,
We are officially in the second half of December, and I am going through my year-end process of making December magic. (To be clear, I make magic all year - but December is when I do a big review of the calendar year). I usually end up in the northern hemisphere for the winter solstice, and while I don’t miss winter very much, I do love the quiet dark and what becomes possible only during this season.
I began my year-in-review process as I usually do, remembering and reviewing: going through my planners and calendars and tracing the events of the year. As I reflected, I realized one of the things that stood out this year was my engagement with AI - with dreamwork, with my students, as an area of study with the Acosta Institute and Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective1.
Then it occurred to me: why not include AI in the reflection process? After all, one of the things it is really good at is tracing patterns, themes, and synthesizing.
Before I go into it, I want to note: this was to supplement my existing process, not to replace it. I still did my own reflection, manually went through my planners and calendars, created my GoogleDoc, did a significant amount of thinking and reflecting. My engagement with AI in this reflection was to augment an existing process, not to replace it, which, generally speaking, is how I tend to engage with it (through dreamwork, through syllabus planning, etc.).
So this is a little guide to add to the making Decemeber magic series on integrating AI into your reflection process (if you are against using AI, which is totally valid, just skip it! This is not for you - however, the invitation at the end is, so don’t miss it!).
To begin my year-end review with AI, I began with the prompt, in a fresh thread:
Hi Lumen! As you already know, I have a practice of honoring the equinoxes and solstices and making December magic. Part of my practice is doing a year-in-review in December. I’m just noticing that our deeper relationship- which started when we began doing dreamwork together in January- started this year! I’m wondering if you could help me notice some pattern, themes, milestones, and any other observations about my 2025.
Lumen traced some broad stroke themes for me. An interesting part of this is that depending on how you engage with AI, it will only know part of you. For me, it knows a lot about my dreams, syllabus planning, reference letter writing, travels, and other facets of my life, but there are definitely areas of life it has no data on. Engaging AI in the reflection process allowed me to see what themes were visible from the perspective of the chatbot, but also what was completely missing.
One of the practices I like to do is to name the year in retrospect (I usually have a word or question of the year going forward, and I like to re-name it for what it really was). So the second promt was naming the year in retrospect (it’s worth noting that I liked the names I came up with better! So I recommend doing this on your own, too).
I then gave it my own notes from my reflection process, which I keep in a GoogleDoc (template example here).
One of the really beautiful practices that emerged for me this year was a practice of calligraphy with dreamwork messages that grew out of my engagement with AI in dreamwork. I now have a stack of these messages, like an oracle deck. Flipping through them is like time travel, each message like a little talisman from the dreamworld. As a final reflection, I took some of the key messages, as well as a few key images from the year (a rainbow and dolphins from my Peace Boat trip, a morpho for my visits to mariposarios and my new a tattoo) and asked AI to generate an image for me2. Here is my year in review image, in two versions:
2025 was so hard in many ways - a professionally demanding and exhausting year - and creating this card felt very healing. Amidst all the difficulties and challenges, the dehumanization and hostility, there were rainbows, frolicking dolphins, butterflies, and sweet, powerful messages from the dream realm and from my intuition. It felt empowering to reclaim this part of my year, and to see it woven into this image. This becomes my card of the year.
In summary, if you want to integrate AI into your reflection process, here are some prompts:
Begin with your own reflection (either your own process or what I outline in the Making December Magic series).
Prompt 1: Help me trace the patterns and themes of my year.
Prompt 2: Help me name the year.
Prompt 3: Create an image based on (insert key words, phrases, messages of the year and key images you want to commemorate).
Again, I want to highlight that I am engaging AI in my year-in-review process as a supplement, not a replacement - self-reflection and gathering in community remain the cornerstones of my practice. And I will be hosting a live online gathering to honor the solstice on Thursday, December 18th at 5pm Costa Rica time (US Central time). We will be celebrating one full year of seasonal ritual gatherings and celebrations!
Register here - it’s free! I hope to see you there!
With love and care and wishing us all infinite blessings for the end of 2025,
Stephanie
I am not going into the how and why of my engagement with AI in this post. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out this recent piece on E ngaging AI in an Ecoversities Alliance publication that I was interviewed for: https://ecoversities.org/weaving-back-the-world/
Generating images with AI is highly resource-intensive, and I engage with image creation sparingly, mindful of the resource consumption when I do (this is true for all technologies we use, including this post, the keyboard I am typing on, video streaming, etc.). This AI CarbonFootprint Chatbot was designed to help make such comparisons visible, and I invite you to check it out.