Reflection. Reckoning. Reconnecting.

It came like blight on a willow tree. A kind of slow, insidious sorcery. Spreading from trunk to branches to leaves. Secluded from meddlesome prying, the decay became an unencumbered radial affliction. No amount of pruning or fungicides could stay this capture. The withering continues. This internal rot will consume. This tree will fall.

When the numbness gradually turns to ache and intensifies to burn as it deepens, I can’t tell if I’m standing. So when I find myself face down on the divide between the bedroom carpet and the bathroom hardwood, I can’t decide if this was how I began my way to the bathroom, as a crawl, or if I’ve fallen. I’ve found myself in this confusion a lot this year. Wondering how I began this walk, have I been crawling this whole time? Did I have a choice? Was it my decision which path, or obstruction, or truth I would uncover? If I did have a choice, why is the road so jagged, strewn with detritus, death? Surely there would be clouds, but a raging hurricane swirling its carnage with eye after eye converging over the whole world - this is what is?

How can this be? It is as if the Earth, and God the Spirit, and the soul of humanity all bellowed at once - “ENOUGH”! A lament forged from ages. The weeping flooding the soil, ascending the sky, crossing the atmosphere, through to the waiting dark of the cosmos. Grievous pangs for the sick, the forgotten, the beaten and wronged. Sorrowful cries of injustice, at the gall of egotism, immeasurable loss of land and life to manmade infernos. And then, silence.

The curious stillness of laying in the dark of a familiar room, made strange by a new perspective. In the dim twilight scuffs on the wall, previously unnoticed, show bright as painted stripes. I ‘m sure I saw them in passing on my way to the shower or passing the dresser to the closet, but I paid them little mind. Dark and embedded, blending into the seemingly unassuming beige stain of the wall. But that’s how it’s supposed to appear. Unobtrusive, modest, typical. So we don’t notice the scuffs. The deep, sinister motive. Its cunning is normality. Designed to appear unmarred, except to those it abuses. They have seen all along, because these walls were not built for them. We pretend that they are, but the truth is the whole method of construction is bad. Exclusionary, oppressive, divisive, antagonistic. The scuffs do not need to be buffed out, the entire house needs to be torn down. Built anew, with all hands and all eyes and all hearts carrying the wood.

The blight is taking my legs, but I have a voice to howl with the Earth, and God, and the humble, vulnerable, resolute humanity in us all. The nature of the path unknown, the obstructions overwhelming, the truths great. And after this year, I have new eyes and a hammer.

When you reflect on the happenings of this past year, what images, feelings, events, thoughts come to mind? How has your perspective changed? How will you connect or reconnect with the world, and your own humanity in the coming year?