All our best to you and yours in the coming year. While I deplore the Gregorian calendar, I do thoroughly enjoy numeric correspondence, recognize synchronicity and embrace emergent opportunities for transformation. There’s a huge shift between 22 and 23 and there are worse devices to hitch our dreams upon these days.
This year our recognition of the solstice expanded to include our family joining a vision boarding session with Lottie Spady hosted by Earthseed Detroit and Healing By Choice. This awesome virtual workshop challenged us to do a ‘free write’ as part of our process. This 2023 Missive is a formalized expansion on the workshop free write. Thank you so much to Lottie for providing this space.
2023 New Year’s Day Missive
Write Daily – My intention is for this New Year’s Day missive to be the first of disciplined daily output throughout 2023 and beyond. I feel as though my retreat from the fray to raise up these kids is coming to a close. It is time once again to reconsolidate and more adequately integrate my creative and artistic pursuits, my identity, with my day to day existence. I do not know the form that this expression will take, though I’m going for a level of exposition above and beyond social media.
Bail on Social Media – My intention is that this will be one of the last messages posted to social media in 2023. I will attempt to maintain Eschaton Life’s presence here as this is my sole connectio to some people and projects I hold dear. I have ceaselessly threatened to leave these platforms for years. The pulleys of my mental well-being have become too intertwined with those of algorithms and apps. After failed efforts to balance or manage theme their removal now seems the path of least resistance. This extraction will support the requisite realignment of priorities.
Get Our House in Order – Taking back the time and emotional energy that these platforms vamp, I intend to establish new connections and address foundational issues I have perpetuated on the mundane plane. The last 13 years have been about basic survival. The resources we have slowly accumulated while struggling to get out from under poverty have been pieced together haphazardly. They need to be reworked to be compatible with dominant systems if we are going to make it out of survival mode.
Family First – To survive without overtly endorsing the occupation of Detroit I monetized my talents to support deep community organizing. While this work matters to me and has impacted perceptions of power through some circles of influence, my personal power and relationships have been left behind. I intend to reprioritize what I expend my energy upon. My kids and partner need me more than I anticipated they would at this stage, and that is OK. I believe that we can provide what they need to eventually live their lives on their own terms.
For the Old Gods – Part of meeting those needs will be actually working to live my life on my own terms. While that is extremely easy for me to surf community as a CISWHT guy, I have experienced difficultly as a heathen. I struggle to bring myself and my relationship with the divine into the public sphere. If one of the reasons I strive toward liberation for all beings is my own unique manifestation and I have struggle so hard to keep that identity, I intend to and must represent that identity in community.
In 2023, I intend to refocus to write daily, bail on social media, work on foundations, put family first, foster new relationships, and advocate for the divine as I experience it in the communities I share in.