Decoding magic...or maybe not.

This time of year, oh this time of the year.

Holiday food, fatness, snow, or simply cooler weather, family, friends, get-togethers, the start of a new year.

I love the first the few hours of January 1st. The world is alive with activity but also sleepy, like a period of time that doesn't quite have any real meaning. Like a lull. Like frozen time. Like it wouldn't make a difference if everything started or ended.

Of course, there's hope just thinking about the possibilities within the new year, like writing a new numerical digit in the date, like feeling old, like being astonished. But in those few hours, there is a spacey nothingness. Every year when I go to sleep at around 2 am (or later) on 1st of January, I wake up to a whole new day, feeling new in many different ways, even though it's all completely psychological. And when I wake up I attempt to do all those things that I'd like to do in the rest of the year. It's my aspiration day and I have as much fun planning it as much as actually living it out. The most beautiful thing about the aspiration day though is simply living it out and then at the end of the day looking at it and seeing whether any of it really matched the trajectory of the year I lived out.

So as this year sort-of-ish ends I'm thinking of January 1st 2010. A three-course dinner to bring in that night, a little bit of tipsiness for reasons unbeknownst to me (I was alcohol-free, I promise), a leisurely day by the beach in Santa Cruz. It was beautiful. And now, I'm looking through the journal I started that day. I wrote a post about fear, about being scared of the possibility of never being scared but I also feared tremendously the possibility of never being able to rise above the fear. And in that submission to fear, I had a weird realization about the vulnerability of humans and human bodies. I wrote of feeling suddenly aware of my muscles and tendons that stretched and turned and played around. Looking back now, I realize that maybe that was the day I made the decision (albeit an unconscious one) to submit to my humanness. In some ways, that has been the entire year for me - a submission to my inner writer, my inner wanderer, my inner risk-taker, my inner meditator, my inner human who stops isolating herself from the world around.

Maybe this is me reading meanings into everything in life because, honestly, that's something I'm great at. But a part of me genuinely believes that this is merely the result of my true being merging gracefully, honestly with the divine of the universe.

How then can I not believe in the possibility of subconscious requests to the universe fulfilling themselves?