Originally I wrote this blessing for friends going through tremendously difficult times. I offer it now, to you, a small prayer for each of us as we stride (some cautiously, some with zest) into a new year. We have been drawn together across space, reaching for each other. May we uplift and strengthen each other. In our differences and in our similarities, we are each divine, and I pray you feel powerful and blessed, nurtured and seen.

You step from Eden, that sheltered and safe home, into a new life. Like the first birth, this birth feels like death. The void yawns before you. Fear seizes you. The unfamiliar threatens to engulf you. Your steps falter.

Beautiful girl, you can do hard things. 

Beloved child, you have done hard things.

This time, like the times before, you are not sent to wander alone. Walking beside you, see! we surround you: generations past, with wisdom; generations future, with hope; generations present, with light. The power of divinity, of creation and multiplication, echoes through you. Every whispering tree, every susurration, says, “Lo, I am with you.” It is an impossible thing you’re being asked to do. And yet you will do it anyway because you were made to do impossible things. Out of ashes burns the Phoenix. Lo. We are with you. 

Sometimes, beginning feels like ending. Making starts with un-making. Can you see the potential for re-creation? Can you feel joy alongside fear, birth wrapped in the loss you face? This is a ruining, yes, one you did not want and would not choose. I would not choose it for you, either. But I trust you, I trust us, to create a new kind of beauty from the despair. This could be, some day, a good ruining, like the rush of blood in birth, the moment of agony when you cried out “my god my god why hast thou forsaken me?” 

Make space, Long Soldier wrote, in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses. Now. Make space now. 

The expansion will come. You will have added to you power, and depth, and wisdom. Laughter will come, knowledge will burst, hope will explode. But first, the step, this step, into the space you don’t know.

This valley, with its shadow of death, is not yours alone. Where you go, we go. Your home is our home. Your god is our god. Our circle includes you; we will shelter you, strengthen you, fight with and for you.

The unknown is filled with monsters and demons who try to destroy you. But you are not, you never were, alone, and with my hand and your hand, entwined, we’ll walk this way, all of us, together.