Deep Calls to Deep | New Year Reflection 2026

We enter this New Year carrying more than resolutions. We carry grief that has not settled, anger that has not cooled, and a sense—shared across communities—that something in our common, decent lives feels increasingly fragile. Recent acts of violence by our government and by outisde infulences -- threats beyond our borders and too often even within them -- and the relentless churn of fear and outrage arriving in our daily news cycles, have left many of us tired before the year has properly begun.

These realities do not need to be rehearsed in detail to be felt. They live in our bodies—in tightened shoulders, shallow breath, restless nights. We are a divided people, yes, but more deeply, we are a disregulated people, struggling to remember how to be present with one another without immediately bracing for harm, or flexing in vigiliance.

It would be tempting to respond with more noise (and I am certainly guilty of this!), more certainty, more speed. But creation offers us all a different invitation.

In the practice of forest therapy, nature does not ask us to solve or defend or persuade. It asks us first to arrive. To walk slowly. To breathe cold air. To let the nervous system relearn safety through contact with what is steady, living, and real. Winter itself teaches this lesson well and if you've been outside in the cold this year, you already know this!

Above ground, the forest appears quiet, even stark. Below ground, life is conserving energy, storing wisdom, preparing for what comes next. Just as we do, as light-workers who care about how everything unfolds. Those of us who breathe in what feels toxic and try to hold it back without a cough. We try to absorb it, even when we think we can't. We try to exhale light.

This New Year carries its own luminous waypoints that can help us orient ourselves without force. The return of light after winter’s depth. A total lunar eclipse in March, when the moon passes briefly through shadow and emerges unchanged (who is with me for this night time gaze???).

The steady rhythm of full and new moons across the year. And, in July, the marking of 250 years since the founding of this nation—a moment that invites not triumphalism, but celebration of our nation's history, a celebration also rooted in humility, remembrance, and care for the land beneath our feet, and for those who cared for it befoer us, and for those who will care for it after we are gone.

Such moments are not answers to all that ails us. These moments are anchors for us. They remind us that time has rhythm, that darkness is not failure, and that renewal often happens quietly before it becomes visible. That's right. The work we are doing is long-lasting, soil building, conservational and protective-- and all this happens before what we are doing gets noticed.

So let this New Year be not a continuation of more noise, but an invitation into embodied listening. Let us walk into woods and fields, under night skies and early mornings, with not so much a need to fix the world immediately as a willingness to feel its deep cry and its deep capacity for renewal. Let us breathe the air until our bodies remember how to settle.

In these times of division, forest paths and night walks do not erase our differences—but they remind us of shared belonging: to land, to sky, to breath. When we walk slowly on the earth, gravity becomes a teacher, roots become companions, and fear loosens its grip.

This year, may we meet one another—and ourselves—in places where silence can hold what words cannot, where light returns without spectacle, and where sorrow is met not with dismissal, but with steadiness.

The earth listens. So do we.