New Year, Same Me
Capricorn 1 // Balancing reflection & action
Hail & welcome to the New Year! I hope you are enjoying the restful and befuddling in-between days. And I hope you were able to surround yourself with loving friends and family to ring in 2024. It’s been very rainy and gray here, which keeps bringing to mind these words from
“Seasonal affective disorder is being affected by the season, land, and latitude, and having to practice denial.” Whew. I hope you find ways to adapt to the gray days, and not just push through them.The sun entered Capricorn on the solstice and I was tickled to see that the card for our first decan is 2 of Pentacles. When I think about the New Year a quiet, rebellious part of me rejects all notion of resolutions. Man plans, and God laughs, right? Which I think is why I loved seeing this card show up. In this card we see a person juggling two coins in a jester-like dance. In some decks there are also ships on the horizon bobbing on rough seas. It implies that even when life is unpredictable, our jester friend maintains balance with his playfulness and attention. The Hermetic title of this card is: Harmonious Change. Even when plans are upended, he dances and juggles his golden coins. Maybe he even laughs along with God.
When you grow up in high-control religion1 there is not a lot of room for taking things lightly. Everything is SERIOUS. Everything has “eternal” consequences. In this world of rigid thinking, instead of juggling golden coins the person in charge hands you a large boulder and explains “God says to carry this.” Resolutions feel heavy as boulders for me too. I wasted YEARS of my life trying to whittle my body down in service to diet culture, to discipline my heart and body into an empty vessel for purity culture. Resolutions always seem to have an undercurrent of outside valuation, especially the value that you maintain your goals at all cost. It’s all so serious.
I listened to a podcast2 last week about abuse & cult dynamics in spiritual spaces (super light, lol) and the episode was specifically about the gamification of modern life. How do we maintain our agency, and act from our personal values in an environment that controls content3 and offers us external rewards and validation. Whether that validation is through watches & fitbits that reward us for healthy choices, spiritual communities that maintain a rigid belief system (no seed oils! no questions!), or social media apps that capitalize on our outrage.
The episode was long and went in too many directions to summarize here (you should definitely take a listen!) but what I took from the episode was actually from the last two minutes of the show. Bad games trap you in a single, pervasive value system and freeze you. But good games are playful, broad, and light.
This year I want to really explore what it means to playfully live from my values in the midst of change. This year I wrote a lot about my values: joy, creativity, unplugging, and earth care. One of my most popular posts this year was on called Doing Nothing, so I think we are all longing to refocus our attention on a new set of values. Perhaps like
said this week, “The value system that is failing the planet is the same one failing us.” When the unpredictable happens I want to bounce lightly on my toes, trusting my inner values to guide me to that next right step. The reflective questions that keep coming to mind are questions like:Does this contribute to my sense of power4 or powerlessness?
Is this a game I really want to be playing right now?5
So this year my jester will be juggling reflection and action. I will regularly take time to reflect on my values6, to remember what is meaningful to the innermost parts of me that aren’t reliant on external *likes* or outer authority. And then I will take bold action to live into those values. Tangible action like writing more, painting and making music, lifting weights because it makes me feel strong and capable, parenting with courage, and nurturing a deep compassion practice are top of my list. But most importantly I will juggle playfully, because whew I’ve spent a lot of my life living EARNESTLY and not really enjoying it.
The jester - juggling two golden pentacles under a spacious, infinite sky - is an image I can hold in my mind through the year to maybe bring more lightness even just some of the time. Can I bring just 10% more silliness to this interaction with my kid? Can I smile in the face of this uncertainty and not immediately jump to the worst case scenario, even for just a few minutes? And when I drop the ball, can I remember it’s just another opportunity to practice compassion?
That’s the jester’s genius - even mistakes are another opportunity for joy.
Last week after Christmas my sister-in-law gave me a big bag of gently used clothes to pass along to my kids. My 7 year old gleefully dug through it, her eyes widening with each new-to-her item covered in flippy sequins. Unfortunately, she was disappointed to find out that most of these clothes would not fit her until next year and that I’d need to wash them and store them away til then. She sighed and as she rolled back to her room I heard her say, “I just hope my butt is bigger next year.” I love this for her.
And yes! I hope my butt is bigger next year too - and my mind, and my heart, and my hands to hold everything that comes my way! I don’t need upgrades or hacks or certainty. I want to keep widening and expanding into an infinite, open sky.
I still appreciate many of the traditions of the Christian faith I was given, but I no longer attend church. And I read from many different sacred texts and practice all kinds of beautiful spiritual disciplines. I’ve given up on most social media because of the way it makes me resort to black and white thinking and I’m a democrat who is very angry with most democratic leaders at the moment. We contain multitudes.
The podcast is Conspirituality - thank you
- and the episode I reference is called Games Against HumanitySpeaking of controlling content - if you haven’t heard about the Nazi problem here, I’m pausing my decision to open up paid subscriptions until I feel like Substack is taking seriously the concerns of MANY writers that monetizing Nazis is a bad thing. I have the privilege of not relying on my subscriptions for my livelihood, so I’ll opt out for now.
I’m still trying to learn that power is not a bad word. I’ve been working with my therapist recently on my feelings of powerlessness, which usually manifest as night terror and anxiety. We can’t have power without a sense of agency and I refuse to outsource my values in 2024.
Direct quote from the gamification podcast - this was from a story about a person who had this question as the wallpaper on their phone so they would see it every time they picked up their device. Genius.
Love this theme of life as a series of games and play. My very wise yoga teacher once told me, "the opposite of perfection isn't imperfection, it's play." I try to bear that in mind when life feels burdensome.
Lindsey, I love what you're writing! Also I feel like we're very much on the same wavelength and some of the themes you're hitting here, I'm hitting tomorrow in my own newsletter, and not because I copied you! Guess there's just something in the ... Ohio air??? But anyway, I basically want to go through and give claps to all your sentences, because you're just spot on, and you say it all in such a lovely way ❤️
Just went through and explored a bunch of the Conspirituality episodes and finally find the right one to download. So many of them look soooo interesting!!