Year Of The Gut

You have at your feet a new year fresh and unblemished:

A blank canvas yet unmarked by the blood of failure, a fresh snow not yet stained by despair.

So here you stand, poised on the fork: a part of you planning out another year’s goals and resolutions, another part hissing to yourself: “fuck these goals, fuck this charade of ‘creating my future’… this illusion that I will someday break through.”

These paths you’ve inherited, you are right to doubt them:

You’ve tried the path of cold, solitary reason…

You’ve lived the life of carefully measured steps… and found it wanting.

This year, why not try a radical departure. This year… why not live by gut.

Let this be your year of magic.

Let this be the year of living by fire, stone, alchemy, spirit, of oblique angles.

Living by gut… it requires new skills, new sensibilities: you must re-sharpen the old intuitions, re-hone your instincts.

You must become again a student of yourself… to come to know and trust yourself as you once did.

To treat yourself no longer as some blinkered workhorse…

To quit the plowed field and sniff out your old overgrown deertrails.

As Elrond thrust the re-forged sword into the self-doubting arms of Aragorn, you, too, must “become who you were meant to be.”

The “meant” is not apparent, or handed down, or written in stone. It is written only in the glinting of your imagination… not something you claim but something you must CREATE unguided, a wolf hunting by scent in darkness.

Begin this new life not “next year,” and not “when the kids are grown,” but NOW:

Begin today, while the snow is yet fresh, and resume it again tomorrow, and the day after that, and again and again and again: re-order your life: resort to your old wilderness: soulful, alert, alive, embodied: covered in mud, and no less bloody, but with eyes bright.

Put to rest the old year and its cold, hidebound way of striving.

Welcome in the old roaring you.

Happy New Year!