🐇 Retrospective: 7 Year (2023)
A brief reflection of the bountiful yet blasphemous year of the Water Rabbit.
The year 2023 was a consciousness expanding, spirit opening, and body activating year filled with unexpected yet profound full circle moments.
It was a year of reintegration, revelation, and renewal. A year showered with reunions, reconnections, and affirming life experiences all juxtaposed against a gruesome timeline of life-altering tragedies, heartbreak, and unconscionable injustices inflicted upon the people and the land.1
Seven Year
This 7 year (2+0+2+3) was a time of unearthing and seeking truth.
A year of voyaging inwardly and from a higher frequency that allowed many of us to make the connections amongst everything we experience, believe, see, touch, feel, sense, and hear. The interconnectivity that binds our human experience together. From the joys we create to the pains we feel. From the sovereignty we experience to the burdens we carry.
This was a year that many of us began to fully receive, embrace, and embody the truth of our inherent interconnectedness.
And this was a year many of us awakened to hard truths that we won’t be able to unsee or make excuses for anymore.
Personal New Years
For me, my new year begins on my birthday and I’ve grown to resonate energetically with the Lunar New Year as the beginning of a new annual season. I still do celebrate the Gregorian calendarian just like most of the world but it’s become less important to me.
Every solar return since 2015, I began listing 3 words or phrases that I’d like to focus my energy on. This has become a sort of grounding practice for me to commemorate each new chapter of life I’m blessed to receive. While also helping to keep me centered when I feel like I’m divvying out or misaligning my energy into too many things throughout the year.
For 2022, my 3 words were:
Generate
Illuminate
Rejuvenate
And for 2023, my 3 phrases are:
Pleasureful ease
Holistic well-being
Transformational trust
Generate
verb / to cause (something, especially an emotion or situation) to arise or come about.
A recurring theme that 2023 generated for me was grief. It surfaced and resurfaced plenty of times throughout the year as it did the year before and in the years before that. But something in the energies of this year shifted how I processed and moved with + through it.
Older versions of myself would self-isolate and disengage externally when grief would unexpectedly show up. Those disruptive periods of time where grief invites themselves over as if we’ve had unfinished business to tend to and prior contracts to fulfill.
This year was different though.
Instead of retreating into the abyss that grief would swallow me in before, I began consciously and intentionally choosing to be with loved ones. I saw myself following through with plans we agreed on instead of cancelling them. And I began communicating how I’m truly feeling along with my desire to experience grief in a different way.
Being with people instead of loitering in isolation and sorrow.
Being outside instead of exiling myself to the confines of my room.
All of this newness was and still is a challenge to practice. With each visit grief gave me, I got to reimagine and practice what it could be like to befriend them instead of shooing them away into secrecy.
Illuminate
verb / to make (something) visible or bright by shining light on it; light up.
In many ways my experience with grief this year illuminated how much growth, healing, and work I’ve received and saw through.
Approaching the end of the year, I now realize how my trip back to California in October of 2022 was a catalyst for my upcoming move happening in two weeks. That trip became a precursor, a vision, a prophecy that was activated all by saying yes to receiving love.
When the pandemic started, my introverted side began it’s ascension. And like many of us, I found so much comfort in isolating from the outside world even after the lifting of mandates and the reopening of the status quo. I remember at one point, I convinced myself that I’d be ok living virtually for the rest of my time here on earth.
But saying yes to go to my dearest friends wedding and my cousins wedding in October of 2022 really opened me up to how much my energy missed being around affirming energies. This was the year I faced a lot of inner doubts and fears head on and I thank my Scorpio moon for supporting me with the passion and commitment needed to do so.
Because the me now is made possible from all those times I said yes to meeting my fears instead of resisting them. To communicate with my fears with curiosity and compassion instead of projections and assumptions.
The me now gets to experience an expanding sense of self and a better understanding of how I relate to the world we live in. Every time I get to face the source of my doubts, worries, and fears it feels like new pathways open up illuminating the way towards a more affirming reality.
Rejuvenate
verb / give new energy or vigor to; revitalize.
2023 has brought new life to my spirit many times over. As the hours approach to when the calendar shifts to a new annual number, my spirit has a reassuring sense of rejuvenation. Of feeling like the possibilities of our visions are steadily coming into fruition. That what we once perceived as an uncertainty is becoming a reality with more confirmation and clarity.
My spirit feels rejuvenated in that it’s learning how to hold and live in the both/and. It’s learning how to be flexible enough to consider nuance and create space for complexity. To have compassion and extend grace to all things, people, and places. And to ground and root itself into the version of myself that is emerging and blooming into light.
Amidst the chaos, confusion, illusions and pains of our world — may all of us who are blessed to see another day, to breathe another breath continue to embody values that care for, honor, and support the humanity of all beings.
It’s with this fundamental understanding of each other where love can emanate, thrive, and exist.
“Without the capacity of listening deeply, we cannot understand. And without understanding love is not real, love is not possible. — Thích Nhất Hạnh
Twenty Twenty Four
In a reality constantly and consistently cycling violent traumas into our psyche, I want to live in a reality with more gentleness, forgiveness, compassion, grace, softness, and substance. A reality with more accountability, curiosity, humility, honesty, and transparency. A reality that actualizes and prioritizes holistic justice, truth, joy, love, sovereignty, freedom, and the well-being, and liberation of all land and beings.
I extend deep gratitude to the beings in my life who remind me of what it means to be alive. The ones who show and teach me how to expand my capacity to love, to hold, to care, to receive, to give, to surrender, to accept, to resist, to reject, to build, to commune, to connect, to share, to let go, to rest, to put down, to slow down, and to continue moving onward.
This new calendar year, may I continue to choose hope, joy, and possibility.
May we continue to care for our vessels and each other especially when this reality can be so damning and disheartening.
May our pursuit towards a liberated reality for all not fall under negotiations to secure brand deals.
May our pursuit towards a liberated reality for all be so expansive that we allow ourselves to vision beyond uncertainties and insecurities.
May we continue to be a reminder and a mirror to one another to show each other that there’s no one way to be. That we can walk this sacred path together of choosing to remain in touch with our humanity, the land, and each other every step of the way.
Closing
Welp, I think that’s enough writing for today.
Blessings and love to us all. And as always, receive what resonates and let go of what doesn’t.
Muah,
Willa
🌺🐉🌺
Actions for Gaza
Download the 5 Calls App to call your reps and demand they advocate for a permanent ceasefire.
Visit www.ShutItDown4Palestine.org for more actions to take.
Learn about the calls for boycotts and the urgent actions listed by the BDS National Committee.
You can also check brands on Boycott the Witness to see their involvement in the occupation of Palestine.