The start of 2021 is not a usual “new year.” We can’t make plans in the usual ways, and we can’t count on it as a new beginning the way we usually think about January.
Instead, we find ourselves in a unique in-between space, as we look back at the incredible change and challenges of 2020, and look ahead to the uncertain hope of the year ahead.
Looking back, we feel the loss, disappointment, and heartache of all we’ve experienced.
Looking ahead, we try to imagine how the vaccine will change our world once again. We also feel the ways our hearts have broken open over the past year into new understandings and new becoming.
This liminal space offers us the chance to listen to the shifts in ourselves, and in the world – all these lessons of the past and the shape of our lives, today, and to find there our place in the great unraveling, and the great turning. The call that beckons to each of us to do our part to bring into being a new way – not just any one person, but for all of us, collectively.
Rather than great heroic acts or tidal wave shifts, this emerging way of being and beckoning call is made manifest in the ordinary, everyday smallest moves of our real lives. Moves that are too small to fail. Barely noticeable on their own. Yet over time, they spiral out across family systems, across communities, across all of life. Leading us to our most authentic self. Partnering with Life in a greater sense of abundance for all.
Why Tiny Revolutions?
This is not the usual new year. We can’t make plans in the usual ways. And yet this is not just a time to hold our breath and suffer through. We’re remembering the ways we started 2020 and feel all over again the pain and the shocks of the year as it hit us. And, it’s not over yet.
So, we need to lean into this natural time of reflection. We need to intentionally go inward, to dig in (rather than numb out*), to discern and to take small, gradual steps towards the future self and the future life that is emerging. (*Although if you are in a place where you can only numb out, then we invite only your self-awareness and self-compassion for this state of your heart and time of life.)
We need a way to make sense of where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going. Instead of making plans, we need to develop practices and discern guideposts that will help us live with intention and accountability and in covenant regardless of how the future shifts in the days to come. We need to lay down tracks that will help us move towards what we love, consider what we want to keep from this time, and ground us with intention in who we are becoming.
With love,
Rev. Gretchen