The Journey Ahead
Another year has slipped past, and has left us with its compilation of memories, challenges faced and wisdom gained. This is a time when we collectively look at what we wish to do differently in the year to come, rooted in where we are now, having grown from where we have been. Our desire for improvement is given a kind and gentle place to start making changes as the calendar rolls over. Garden notes are poured over and we study the mistakes we made, or the ways we want to do things a little differently in the coming season. Maybe we want to change the way we are in relationship with our community, or maybe we wish to make changes in a chosen career, or take a leap and challenge ourselves to do something entirely different. We often take a look at our own health and make a plan to adjust what we put in our bodies and the way we see movement as health. The future is so bright standing here at the beginning of a new year. Anything is possible, truly. It only takes desire for change and the motivation to see it through and a new pathway will open before you, waiting with more to offer than you can imagine standing at the starting line.
Plant medicine is a beautiful way to incorporate wellness changes and additions to your life. Plants are not simply packed full of constituents in their chemical makeup that bring us wellness, they have a sacred life force and consciousness within them that supports the sacred life force within us. In working with plants to improve our body, mind, and spirit, we take the life they have cultured from the sun, from carbon, from the vitality of the entire planet we live on, and accept the regeneration, renewal, healing, and sustenance into ourselves.
Wherever you have come from and wherever you are right now, these gentle allies of the earth are waiting to meet you exactly as you are. There is no wrong place to be, only where we have arrived after a lifetime of work and where we will go from here. The gentleness of these allies recognize that goals are not deadlines, and our path may yet change again on the journey ahead.
I personally don’t like to set resolutions this time of year. Instead, I set intentions and make a list of goals. These things may not seem entirely different to a resolution, but to resolve to do something, change something, or become something seems rather definitive to me. Life is anything but definitive, and instead presents as something fluid, ever changing, always growing, endlessly cycling. If we are resolute, this offers little room for the way in which we are required by life to sway in the current of experience that comes at unexpected times, in unplanned for ways. Instead, with setting intentions and goals, I offer myself the gift of receiving life as it comes. An intention can start as a seed of change, but can grow branches and countless buds, which bring life. To take life one breath at a time, to make the future a generous and gentle place for myself and my community, I give myself the grace to have goals without deadlines, intentions without restrictions, and plenty of patience for the unexpected.
As I walk through the snow encapsulated winter-woods, my fingers brush pine and fir and I can feel their supportiveness. I stumble upon bright rosehips, filled with their promise to sustain me through the rest of this cold season. Juniper berries decorate the snow-laden boughs of their mother trees. All of the forest is whispering, in a voice I’ve learned to listen carefully for, that this season is full of life and a wealth of goodness, waiting to be harvested for the healing ahead. It’s this connection to who I am right now, the place I am standing, and the myriad of things I cannot see, hidden underneath what’s right in front of me, that propels me into all that waits ahead.
I wish you a bounty of wellness and goodness in the year ahead.
-Jenn
