Dearest 2015,

I woke up and you had already arrived in the wee small hours, warmed by the glow of a gas fireplace, laying beside a man I loved on our IKEA mattress in the house he bought for us.  I thought I’d birth my babies in that house — hear their tiny feet slapping the floors that we buffed by hand, echos of those moments in the new hours of a new year, lit by the soft orange glow of wishing.

I felt your lurking, the enormity of your lessons breathing hot down my neck.  You pressed me right up against the clear glass of my heart.  I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to blink and feel the tears leaving hot streaks down my face; so I wouldn’t have to pack up more boxes; so I wouldn’t have to face the cavernous Unknown.

I have fought you.  I thought planning and foresight were gonna be my bestest friends, and that if I could hold a vision (any vision), you’d relent and just show me the golden egg already.  But the weeks were like aisles in a grocery store, and I walked through them with what always felt like a perpetually empty shopping cart — grasping, hoarding, thinking so much, and bracing myself against all the empty space.

I thought silence was a curse; I wanted only to fill it up with something, not knowing you’d given me what I needed more than what I wanted: Space. The insulation of Alone — really alone for the first time in years — and so. much. time.

You answered my prayers with the only thing that would actually get me to listen: Silence.

You’ve shown me that love isn’t born in crowded places where the heart can barely be heard, but in the honest echo of silence.  What else could I possibly be but honest in all that silence?  How else could you get me to listen if I was afraid, even, to hear the sound of my own longing?  How else could I come to know the power behind the veil of whispers, imploring me to stop running toward — or away — from anything, and simply fall.

You’ve shown me that Empty is a womb — a holding space, an incubator — the place where Life can sprout.

Fuck you for this Year of Runaway Trains, 2015.  And bless you for the hot steam-breath of that whistle out ahead where I dared not look, for showing me that Intuition is a wild, shrill call from the Soul to just stop; it is the teacher whose abstract lessons insist that listening is the only thing that ever stops the train.  It’s the banshee call from my own deep Self, nestled in a cave tucked inside my chest: great guru heart.

You were the year I died to myself a million times, in tiny unseen ways: the honorable deaths of what never wanted me to live, anyway.  Because what is a life that is bound by the stories of the past?

How can we possibly come home when we are still gripping the trees in the cold, dark woods: stories told in the clamoring voices of Fear?

You, 2015, were the year I found God in every detail; the year I learned that language is a human construct for a love so immense and unyielding, that to name it is to limit it, but to surrender to it is to know it intimately, and that in becoming who we are, there is only letting go of who we are not.