Making December Magic! (Part 3)
Part 3: Naming the year and dreaming forward
Note: This is the third installment of the Making December Magic series. Here are links to the earlier installments:
Dear Enchantable friends,
Welcome to Part 3 in the Making December Magic series! In Part 1, we remembered and reviewed. We took stock of the year, what happened, what went well, what didn’t. In Part 2, we reflected with freewriting prompts. Today in Part 3, we will begin to dream forward, and will also talk about naming the past year and choosing a word of the year for the new year.
First I wanted to share a little astrological tidbit: Mercury goes retrograde this week, on December 13 (or December 12 depending on your time zone). Mercury retrogrades can get a bad rap in popular culture, known for haywire communications and befuddled travel plans. However, Mercury retrogrades are also a huge gift if we work with their energy. They are a ripe time to slow down, reflect, and review. So if you are following along in this process, the astrological weather of this moment is deeply supportive of this process, so we can work with it and make the most of it! How exciting.
I have written before about how important it is to name things. To paraphrase the great James Baldwin, we cannot change things until we face them, and I believe part of facing them is naming them. Speaking them out loud. Calling them out and in. Whether it is something we want to change or something we want to call in, naming is important.
I like to name the year forward and backward - to name the past year, based on what themes were present, and to choose a word of the year for the year to come, what we want to call in for the coming year.
In 2023, my word of the year was ENCHANTMENT.
Yes, Enchantable was born from this word.
Let me tell you why and how I chose this word (I also wrote about this in one of my first posts, The Year of Enchantment). I want to share where Enchantable came from, because it came from the interbeing of pain and joy, wonder and loss, heartache and happiness. Wanting to hold enchantment with the grief of being alive and being human, loving and losing. It came from a place of deep grief and suffering, and wanting to re-enchant my life.
The period of 2020-2022 was deeply challenging and painful on a collective and personal level. We lived through a global pandemic, if we were lucky to survive it. My mother passed away during this time, in January 2021. She fell asleep in 2020, and did not wake up in 2021 (I will probably write more about this on my new year’s post).
The year 2021 for me was characterized by what I called “pandemic winter solo parenting while grieving.” This year in particular was unbearably hard and heavy. While I had a lot of support in terms of loving relationships, so much of this time was spent in isolation, alone, mothering a toddler through long Colorado winters. Holding my grief and holding my daughter with insufficient support. It was a devastating time.
In 2022, we were still in a deep phase of the pandemic (we still are - it is just morphing; as I write, my 96-year old grandmother has just caught COVID and I am deeply concerned). But things started to shift for me. I had started to adjust to the world without my mother in her embodied form. I defended my doctoral dissertation and finished my PhD. I published an article I was proud of. I attended the IIPE in Mexico, a pivotal and transformative personal-professional trip. And I began applying for jobs, one of which I landed - in my current role at the University for Peace.
Approaching 2023, in this new life in Costa Rica, living a dream, I wanted to reconnect with wonder and awe. I wanted to hold it alongside the grief I felt in deep personal and collective loss. I wanted to remember that amidst tragedy and destruction and heaviness and loss, there is beauty all around us. I wanted to attune my attention to it.
So for 2023, I chose ENCHANTMENT as my theme, intentionally re-enchanting my life. This led to me writing an article about re-enchanting education (and presenting in a symposium by the same title), which led to the birth of this Substack, which has increased and magnified the enchatment of my life and with life in infinite and exponential ways. I am grateful to you for being here, for holding and noticing and playing with enchantment (and disturbance, and the interbeing and interplay between them) is magnificently richer and more meaningful in community. Sharing Enchantable with you makes my life infinitely more enchantable.
This year, 2023, has been the year of Enchantment, and Enchantable. But also looking back at 2023, I see other ways to name this year.
It was a year of flourishing.
It was a year of expansion, growth, and stretching.
It was a year of devotion, diligence, and dedication to my vocation and dreams (another one of my intentions for the year).
It was a year of a lot of output - here, and in the courses I taught, the writing I did and articles I published, the presentations I gave, and on and on. A lot of outward facing, public output. Teaching and learning in public.
(Side note: this was the astrology of the year, too, with Jupiter in Taurus in my sun sign and 9th house of teaching, learning, travel, and publications. Astrology is magic).
So those are the words I added to naming 2023, the year of Enchantment: Expansion, Growth, Stretching, Devotion, Diligence, Dedication, Output.
I usually wait until I am mostly done with the reflection process towards the turn of the calendar year to choose the word of the next year, but I will tell you what is landing right now: FLOURISHING.
To flourish is “to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment.”
I want my expansion to be sustainable. I want it to have roots and legs, be sturdy and stable amidst the emergence and wildness of my growth. I want to expand in whatever directions will take me, while being rooted in my values and in a particularly favorable environment. I want resources and energy and creativity to be able to flow through me, and to support everything around me in flourishing too, in the process.
The next invitation for the Making December Magic process is: to name the past year (it can have more than one name). What themes were present? What was the word of the year, in hindsight?
Then, the next part is to dream the year forward. Based on your 2023 review, remembering, and reflections, start to make some aspirations, intentions, and big dreams for the coming year. You can use the same template as we used in part 1, but this time use it moving forward (I have added this section to the template). What areas of your life do you want to focus on? What do you want to carry forward into the next year? (You might want to revisit the last set of reflection questions from the last installment1 to see what you came up with).
My encouragement for this part of the process:
Dream big! Don’t hold back!
Don’t feel like you need to make aspirations or intentions for each section. Maybe there is just one area of your wheel of life that you want to work on, and that is fine. A few concrete intentions are better than many that are too hard to achieve. Decide where you want to focus and put your energy and focus there.
With any intentions, try to make them actionable. If your goal is to increase your inner peace by starting a daily meditation practice, think about: how are you going to do this? Set a calendar reminder? Download an app to support you with guided meditation? (I recommend Insight Timer, the Plum Village app, and the CHANI app :)
Then, you can choose your word of the year. Like I mentioned, I often wait to do this until close to the end of the process, but as you dream forward, you can see if there is a theme that is already standing out, words that are sticking with you that could be your theme for the year, what you want to call in.
We will continue stirring with these intentions and aspirations as we move towards our solstice spell and ritual, in your next Making December Magic installment! We will also talk about the magic of diligence, and how part of the magic of making our dreams is showing up over and over and over again.
Happy dreaming!
With love,
Stephanie
P.S. Please let me know how the process is going for you in the comments below!
Looking forward:
What dreams do you want to carry forward, whether new dreams or ones that did not get realized this past year?
What do you want to experience more of? Less of?
What do you want to call in?
What questions are you carrying forward/living into?
What are your deepest desires for the new year? What do you most desire?