• 2025: Wild

    2025: Wild

    For something like 15 years, I’ve been celebrating the winter Solstice with a day without electric lights. I keep a tealight lantern next to the bed with an aim-flame. Pillar candles dot the house, one on the bathroom counter, another on the stove, a fat three-wick candle in the middle of the coffee table. As the light fades in the late afternoon, I light more candles, cook by candlelight, read tarot by candlelight. It fits the energy of the season, which feels to me contemplative, quiet, the very opposite of the glitzy holiday parties and obligations.

    My birthday is at the end of December, and the time between Solstice and January 2 feels like a time apart for me, a quiet hibernation in which I can reflect on the past and dream the future.

    Julie is a white woman with red lipstick, curly red hair, an orange dress, and glasses on her head.

    I can’t remember, now, when I first did some more formal version of reviewing the previous year and setting intentions for the new one—or even how I did it. It was at least 14 years ago and might have been Your Best Year Yet by Jinny S. Ditzler, or Danielle Laporte’s Desire Map. There were years I made my own and years I followed someone else’s workbook. Over the past few years I’ve done a combination of Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year and the Makselife planner.

    But I didn’t really do them.

    I filled them out. I reflected. I thought about what I wanted. I dutifully reviewed my months and wrote down things to remember and tried to think about lessons learned.

    But nothing ever felt alive. My goals involved meditation and journaling, being a better friend, trying to create a consistent spiritual practice, writing regularly, those kinds of things. And none of it was bad. In fact, I’m 100% certain that those goals have been deeply, profoundly alive for all kinds of people. They just weren’t for me.

    They’re the modern-day equivalent of catechism, and I’m nothing if not a Catholic-born Good Girl. So I set my goals and tried my best and I could watch it all fall apart around me. I would feel guilt for a little bit, despair at my inability to stick to things that are Good For Me, and eventually sigh and let it go and feel adrift. Again.

    2024, it turned out, was a complete shitshow, a fact I revisited as I reviewed each month when I sat down with Unravel Your Year on New Year’s Day. My beloved cat died what I think of as a young and unexpected death, since she was only 12 and our other cat lived to be nearly 21. My marriage of 20 years, which had been going really well, suddenly hit an iceberg and threatened to slip beneath the waves. My placid and contented work life started to tilt just the littlest bit off-center before dumping my whole team onto a speeding rollercoaster. I developed some close relationships that I cherish dearly and that gave me a new lens through which to see some of the work I desperately need to do.

    And that’s just what was happening in my own, personal life. I’m not even talking about everything happening out there.

    The more I reflected on 2024 and the more I thought about what I wanted in 2025, the more I recognized that I need to work on centering myself in my own life. I need to start with my own needs and desires and dreams, instead of fitting them into the crevices left from meeting everyone else’s needs, facilitating everyone else’s dreams. (Good Catholic girl, remember.)

    So I decided my word of the year was selfish. I need to lean into selfishness, I need to reclaim selfishness from the moralistic judgement that falls especially on people perceived as women, who must never, ever be selfish. It made my stomach twist a little, a sure sign of something fertile and rich.

    After a couple of days, though, selfish didn’t feel quite right. I chalked it up to self-censoring and kept moving forward. But even though I coached myself through the feelings of unworthiness and fear that showed up, it still wasn’t right.

    When I felt into it, selfish was too constrictive. It was too focused on other people, still. It was me, not you. A step in the right direction, sure, but not the thing itself.

    The thing itself, it turns out, is wild. Not me vs. you, but living out of my own wild soul. Finding out what my own wild soul actually is.

    A waterfall streams down a cliff face into a roiling Lewis River.

    When I sat down to do annual goals, I did them from the perspective of what a commitment to wild would look like in all the domains I was contemplating. It looks like throwing out self-care and instead building systems and routines that feed my wild soul. It looks like throwing out altars and meditation and asking my wild soul what communing with the Divine looks like.

    This word, these goals, they feel alive. They feel scary. I feel kind of shy about them, because they matter in a way a goal of journaling never did.

    I’m excited, too. I’m excited to find out what my own wild soul wants, what it loves, what it is.

    2025 is the year of wild. Buckle up, buttercups.