Love at the end of the world

My prediction for 2024

This morning, it was already light out when I got up. This is rare. I’m usually up in the dark of the morning to pour my cup of coffee, the peaceful cup I savor in the quiet before work and other pressures of the day.

For the past month or two, I’ve been struggling with plantar fasciitis. The pain in the morning is intense and it takes me a little bit longer than usual to make my way downstairs then back up again so that I can sit in my bed and begin my day slowly, which is what I like to do. During this week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, the pain in my body has forced me to slow down, which is perhaps exactly what I needed to do because the last few months have felt like pushing through obligations while my energy dwindles and currently, my energy reserves are empty.

A few times in the days leading up to Christmas, I went shopping with my mom and with Tracy, to the mall and two different shopping centers. Years past, these places would have been crowded with shoppers and heavily decorated. There would have been excitement in the air, something similar to joy and expectation, but this year, the crowds and the decorations were minimal, the shelves largely bare. There was no joy in the air. The energy felt flat and lifeless. Tracy and I drove out one night to look at lights, but there were so few.

It feels like the end of the world, I said.

We had a soft Christmas Day. We listened to music and watched movies and ate food. On Boxing Day, we had Christmas with Tracy’s family and mine. It was good. Lovely even, but it was also oddly warm out and things felt slightly off.

These mornings, when I get up, after I’ve had my coffee, I light a candle, burn one of my wishes for the new year, pull an oracle or tarot card. I’m planning 2024 as I always do, and I’ve chosen a guiding word. I have plans, but the year will bring what year always brings, including pleasures, surprises, and unexpected events. For all of us, I’m certain 2024 is going to be a wild ride. As it always is, our experiences will be largely shaped by our responses and reactions to the things that happen.

I don’t believe this is a time for soft pedaling politics. This is not a time when we can disengage and hope that democracy will work itself out. Likely, every presidential election for the rest of my life will feel important, but this year’s is as crucial as a presidential election has ever been. With every cell in my body, I believe that if Trump is elected, we will not only lose our democracy, the world will be plunged into a nightmare scenario. Perhaps that sounds too dire to you, but I believe the reality is even more dire. For the record, I don’t believe it will happen, but we have to make it not happen and maybe the lifelessness I feel at the moment in the collective is exhaustion. 

We’ve been living in a pandemic for four years, we know it’s not really over, though we’re expected to act as if it is, and the discord is draining. Fascists are operating out in the open, and that is draining. The coming election is going to be tense, and that is draining. We see that we are changing. The earth is changing, the country is changing, what we believe to be true is changing, and that is draining. We the people are tired.

These are undeniably times of great change, and not the sort of change that we can look to in the past. This is a new sort of change, rapid and dramatic, and all the time coming more swiftly, sweeping away the things we’ve taken for granted. Even when that which is being swept away needs to be swept away, even when we welcome the change, it can still be overwhelming and even scary. 

The empty malls at Christmas for example. Good, I think. Let it go away. Let’s pour our resources into small, locally owned businesses. Let’s shop where things are real, and let’s shop less. Let’s stop buying things we don’t need. Let’s stop feeding the machine of mass production and enslaved labor.  I’m all for it and yet can’t help but notice that a flat shopping center in December is disconcerting.

What might be coming in 2024? 

It’s a question I always ask at the cusp of a new year, but this year, it seems particularly pressing. Will Covid recede? Will we get an improved vaccine or treatment? Will healthcare costs go down? Will grocery prices go up? Will we regain our reproductive rights? Will we do something about gun violence? Will war continue to rage on? Will we hang on to democracy? When are the aliens going to get here? What am I supposed to be doing? Anyone have a clue?

Here are my predictions for the coming year:  

• The civil unrest we’ve already been experiencing in this country will continue and intensify. We will see little flare ups, violent uprisings here and there. 

• We will continue to experience intense weather - like the giant waves currently slamming the coast in California; tornadoes and earthquakes in places that don’t usually have them. 

• We will continue to see the collapse of traditions and institutions we once thought were solid, and the downfall of people we thought we knew.

• We will continue to see the creation of truly good and innovative art - film, music, books - that speak to our experience and inspire us.

• AI is going to continue to expand and new mind-blowing technologies developed. 

• We’re going to see and document more UFOs in the sky. This might even be the year when we see the ETs. (I don’t know about you, but I plan on making them a cup of tea. If they want to take me for a ride on a craft, I am ready!)

• We will experience a shift toward holistic, natural medicine, maybe even an understanding that herbal medicine and western medicine don’t have to be at odds with one another. 

• We will truly learn how to ground ourselves and understand ourselves as earthlings. 

• We will continue to understand that our binary thinking about gender and sexuality has been all wrong. 

• We’ll see how wrong we’ve been about a whole lot of things. 

• We will participate in more spontaneous dance parties.

• We will cry more, laugh more, and feel intensely connected to the depth of our experience.

• We will be so grateful for the people and places we love.

As our society, our culture, our systems of belief change, those in power (I don’t mean elected officials or celebrities, I mean the people whose names we don’t even know, who hold all of the wealth) are going to continue to feel the squeeze of their dying empire, and they will act out in all sorts of ways.

In my city, developers are purchasing historic houses with the intention of tearing them down. The destruction of beautiful buildings and farmland is happening with a viscous zeal. Rapidly, what was unique and interesting about this place is being replaced with poorly constructed, ugly buildings. Developers love to say about those of us who oppose what they’re doing, that we are stuck in the past, that we don’t want change. This is, of course, untrue. Life IS change.

It’s just that not all change is good and not all growth is progress. 

We must be mindful about the changes we make, we must be heartful, but I hope we do change this year - on a cellular level. I hope we move out of the anxiety and loneliness we now inhabit, into a new world. I hope we are able to survive, to keep living here, not on this planet but as a part of it. I hope we learn how to love one another in deeper ways than we ever have before. I hope we learn to love the world and ourselves. I hope we learn how how to thrive by doing the work of our souls, speaking truth, making the art that lights us up. I hope we learn how to nourish and support one another.

I hope we become unreasonably tender with one another.

Change is not something that happens to us; the changing world is not something we have to endure. We are the makers. We are the changers. We are changing the world. We perceive, we receive, we grieve, we are reborn.  And even in the midst of turmoil, there are some things that do not change. As we stretch our roots down into the eternal, we remember those things too. We remember who we are. 

There are things we can do this year, no matter what happens with the banks or the fault lines or virus mutation: 

• We can appreciate what is good and beautiful in each moment. 

• We can build something with our own hands. 

• We can connect to one another and help those in need. 

• We can explore our communities and the world. 

• We can forgive those who have wronged us, including ourselves. 

• We can listen to the trees as they sing to us. 

• We can plant seeds and cultivate plants and grow our own foods. 

• We can honor our bodies. 

• We can stand up for what’s right.

• We can try new and playful things. 

• We can get enough sleep. 

• We can vote. 

• We can read. 

• We can discern. 

• We can make playlists of our favorite songs. 

• We can paint our walls outrageous colors.

• We can help out when we see others in need.

• When aliens show up, we can offer them tea.

• We can change our minds and change our hearts.

If this is the end of the world - I hope it’s the end of the world of greed and unbridled consumerism and throw-away-culture, homogenized towns, the rugged individualist looking out for number one. I hope it’s the end of a world that seeks to build walls and the birth of a world that invites others in. I hope it’s the end of forced conformity and the birth of honest expression.

Change is ongoing; how we respond in each moment is everything. 

Maybe 2024 will be the year when we allow ourselves to feel it all and choose love even still. Let’s do it. Let’s choose big, crazy, rolling love. Let’s go forward into the unknowable future bolstered by the energy of it. Let’s make the magic of love. Let’s start right now.

Happy New Year.