The theme in 2025 is vulnerability
Here begins the next solar cycle of my life. Doors quietly shutting as 2024 and decades of a turbulent, confusing cycle come to an end. I’m spending Christmas and Hanukkah in a small mining town in southeastern Arizona, 11 miles from the Mexican border and 5,538 feet above sea level. My heavy breathing is evidence I am in an alien landscape having come from the underworld (I live below sea level in Mississippi).
My meditation guru has asked me to come up with a theme for 2025. One that, in lieu of an outcome, has a feeling attached to it. I’ve turned this over and what pops is vulnerability. I don’t like it. The feeling that you have unzipped your soul, heart, innards and invited someone else to come in and look around. Intimacy is the last frontier – fr – a large part of me wants to flip back to indifference than even fathom this introduction to Intimacy 101.
Yet, here I am.
An Oracle, whose earthling name is Amelia, told me when I first arrived in Bisbee, Arizona that she saw me riding the back of a giant eagle with my bow and arrow flexed, and I need to be able to “pivot without judgment” when the bird detours, because eagles are like that – they’re dynamic. We were sitting in the window of an artsy venue with one-of-a-kind furry and fringy clothing, black and white photographs for sale, and a woman selling assorted mystical tchotchkes.
The tchotchke woman was showing a customer her bespoke incense called fruition. She mixed water and fire in the same bowl. The sun streamed in Arizona bright, unfiltered, and the smoke from the bowl grew so intense that my beautiful young Oracle paused, then narrowed her eyes in its direction, so the incense woman hurried out to the sidewalk with the smoking bowl of fruition held in front of her like a precious divination. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered as she passed.
The Oracle continued.
I had walked by the storefront multiple times in the couple of days I had been here and this time, when I walked in, the Oracle said, “Yay! I’m so glad you came in!”
This is how you pick an Oracle – a beautiful young woman who greets you with enthusiasm. The day before, I had passed a small tarot shop near my brownstone where the door was always closed with a handwritten sign that read, “Reading in Progress,” and I thought I might try my fortune there. Later that same day, in the bright Arizona sunshine, which casts long shadows that make it impossible to see even with sunglasses on, (I come from a place with softer sunshine), I spied what looked like two bunnies running into the store. I took off my sunglasses and laughed. What I saw was the tarot reader’s furry boots (not expected, it is 70 degrees in Bisbee) as she shuffled back in her shop. I laughed and said to the reader, Ha! I thought your boots were small animals. She turned to me, her mouth closed tight, with a say less expression. So I did.
There are so many people I know who turn away from the mysterious – a reading, God, coincidences, miracles – but I lean all the way in. Louise Nevelson, an artist and pioneer in the art of sculpture whom I admire, said “I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.” And this has become a mode of being for me. In my better world, I am open to receive messages from the divine and to attune my eagle eyes to what moves in the landscape.
So I call in vulnerability this year as my theme. I want to see how elastic my heart is, how much I am willing to risk to feel more profoundly, perhaps even other worldly, and to set my flag firmly down into the rich soil of an unchartered territory.
Amelia – Oracle
Oracle reading – note the woman riding the eagle in the top left corner. That’s me!