Epiphany / 10 things for 2025
Possibility, reality, and some little steps back to myself. Plus John O'Donohue
Epiphany (noun):
January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles
a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something
an illuminating discovery, realisation, or disclosure
I love to inhabit possibility. Right now, I live in the possibility of a new year, and the possibility of my book which will soon be going out on submission to publishers. Neither of these things are yet real — I can imagine all the good bits and not have to live the bumpy reality (like people actually reading my words and ideas. Urgh). I live at the edge of living, the landscape of imagination stretching out before me.
Possibility is a space I love to be in. Stepping into that possibility though — actually living life — comes with choice, commitment, effort, challenge, rejection. It asks me to walk rather than imagine walking. And walking, especially when there are no paths to follow — as I know from being a trained walking guide — comes with risk, unexpected obstacles, unseen danger.
Before writing this though, I went for a walk and it was life-giving: the air, the cold, the blood that raced through my body and mind. The reality of the walk was better than the possibility of a walk, because although it wasn’t perfect, the reality of it made me feel part of this world and alive.
In the new year, coupled with that promise of possibility is the lure of newness. We are led to believe we need newness. New products, new looks, a whole ‘new me’. But I wonder if newness is really what we’re looking for. Novelty can be exhausting, wasteful, a distraction, as can the myth of endless growth and progress.
Perhaps instead of a new self, we could do with the space, quiet, time, and capacity to find our old self; the selves that have always been there waiting for us to find them. Not newness, but trueness. Not newness, but depth. My husband likes this quote from David Bowie: "I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."
6th January — Epiphany — marks the wise men following a star that stopped at Jesus. I picture them setting out into the unknown, following a hunch, walking and seeking something but not knowing what they’d find. They found a baby in a manger in a stable in Bethlehem. Perhaps not what they’d imagined, but the upside-down logic they discovered there — of the lowly and the least being the most sacred thing — was world-shaking, and they got to witness it. That reality was perhaps more challenging but also more beautiful, more life-giving than what they could have imagined.
Here then, 10 steps I’ll take as I walk 2025 (and beyond). I share them here because we are more likely to do things that we write down and tell others we’ll do. I hope these small, unremarkable steps might act as stars that point me home to myself, and to others, and to the luminous reality of the world:
First things first. Each morning the world remembers itself when the sun shines, and I will remember myself too, before others try to tell me who I am. Each morning, I will walk a small path of spirit and words and prayer. Julia Cameron’s practise of Morning Pages from her beloved book The Artist’s Way has served me in the past, so I will turn to it again.
I will use my hands more. I want to remember and re-learn the contours of this world that seems so in need of repair. I want to help build reality. My dad, his dad, and the generations stretching back before them all used their hands with wood, farming, horticulture. Recently, my husband and daughter and I went to the allotment. It was raggedy and wintery, and for ten minutes, I hacked away at rapidly creeping brambles. By the end I was scarred, muddy, but alive — I had felt reality in a way I hadn’t for ages. This year, then, I will stay close to the soil, and to good food, and — prompted by both this excellent recent post from Grace Pengelly — I will finally learn to knit.
Things don’t move towards wholeness, health, or rightness by getting bigger, better, faster, wealthier, more. Instead, sometimes they must retreat, retract, come apart, stop. I will trust my non-linear path, which seems to be moving further away from established ideas of career progression, and move towards truth and deep values. I will not pretend I have it all together — an idea that’s unhelpful and impossible to live by. I will seek freedom from the constant push towards more, towards status, towards growth, and lean instead on deeper truer older foundations.
I will choose connection over convenience. This might mean waiting in line at a shop for a human cashier rather than use the automated checkout. It might mean speaking to a person in that queue rather than reach for my phone.
I will choose movement over convenience. My body cries out when I force it to sit for too long. It wants to walk, to remember its shape, to fit that shape into the world and connect with it. This means, amongst other things, a walk before I slide behind my desk to ‘get on with things’.
I will be aware of and try to remove illusions — of self, of others, of the shoulds of life. I’ll scroll less, I’ll seek belonging over acceptance, I’ll get better at sharing what I really think even when that might mean a difficult conversation or rejection. As someone who prefers mediation to provocation, this can feel hard. Also, I want to see if I can move some online relationships — people I only ‘know’ through Instagram or Substack — offline, into reality.
If love lives in relationships then relationships are everything, and I want to cultivate and prioritise and choose them. I will make decisions based on whether they move me towards or away from relationship, towards or away from love.
The more unnecessary stuff I have, the heavier life feels. The planet is choking with too much stuff. This year, then: no leaning on the illusion of stuff. I don’t buy much, but it can creep in when I’m searching for distraction, so, no new clothes, no unessential body products (I have way too many lip balms), nothing in a sale just because it’s in a sale. And, I’ll get rid of a few things each week (clothing, papers, old stuff I hang on to just in case).
I have struggled to finish books since our daughter was born. I graze and snack and flit between books in snippets before my eyes shut at night. I will rethink my routines so that I can read with depth. It keeps me me.
I can feel awkward and cringey and apologetic when I share my words and ideas, but I will take my space alongside others, and remember my shape, and why it matters that I live that shape and no one else’s.
Can you help to hold me accountable? Please check in to see how I’m doing with these small steps, please ask about knitting and soil and relationships. The comments are one place to do this, as are messages, and the ‘Notes’ section of Substack. I will meet you in these places and perhaps elsewhere, too. And I would love to know what paths you are walking this year — are there ways we can hold each other accountable, and walk these paths together?
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Thank you for being here. Here’s a new year blessing from John O’Donohue:
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
If you like this post, you might like these:
You’re restless Elizabeth, what are you searching for?
Is it that you just need to find the best way of being your shape as you say. Probably there’s no best way, it’s just being calmly sure of yourself as yourself.
(Your husband’s David Bowie saying is majestic :)
You probably don’t sit easily in collections of people because you’re interrogating their togetherness and recognising that they are blockers on real progress with their ingrained thinking and this grates with the injustice of what they don’t seem to know / care about or understand.
You are perhaps like an eye in the sky which sheds a tear when trying to tune into their frequency as theirs is a jumbled & unintelligent one which makes you feel like the alien when actually it is you who is the grounded and enlightened one.
I’m full of admiration for your openness and willingness to engage with the issues that should be the most important.
ie how to live a better life with each other on this beautiful earth with the great knowledge gleaned by many writers and thinkers over the ages.
(This is just a poor reenactment of ‘Morning Notes’ probably too deep into the evening to be taken in any way literally or as insightful so please take lightly ever so lightly!)