Ritual for a New Year
Birthday Meditation
On Introspection
A Meditation
Paper
Make a timeline of the last year of your life. Plot the events — highs and lows — with corresponding lines reaching to the top and bottom of the page, with the mundane and so-so time spent scattered in between.
Gratitude
Carried through another year.
Pray
Thankful for the highs, may we learn our lessons from the lows.
Celebrate.
On Embodiment
Ground
Listen to your favorite record that makes you feel like yourself.
Mine is here
Outside
Do something that makes you feel physically strong.
Pedal or sprint as fast as you can.
Hurl the heaviest rock you can carry into the ocean.
Pause.
Release the last year.
Remember your loved ones.
Walk
Walk and walk and walk.
Celebrate.
On Realization
Visualize
What do you want the next year to look like?
Who do you want to be?
Where do you wan to go?
Write
Goals. Plan. Strategize.
Grow through it.
Celebrate.
Redefining My Relationship to a County
In living for so long in a county I was not born in, my relationship to where I had taken up space in morphed.
I lived in a county that was not my own for a long time. Naturally, over time my relationship to where I had taken up space in morphed. Assimilating, investing in a city, joining different families and calling them your own was years in the making. Building a life, a career, a skill in the native tongue was the main work of my 20s.
Relocating was a slow fade, a burn that occurred spread over years, after which, I found myself home. Actually home, in California. My California-ness, had been such a marker in my identity as a foreigner.
After going back every summer since officially moving home I find myself on the same ICE train, 528 to Hamburg, year after year. My faithful bicycle, which withstood lonely winters without it’s owner, again road like a dream through dirt paths and cobble stones.
It is foreign and yet home. I no longer live in the stone walls of the city and yet, it is a place I feel often more at home than my birthplace.
In the rolling years, I have learned that the shape a country takes up in myself, and the shape I take up in it, will change, inevitably. There is a freedom in it, being able to roam free and giving a nod to a country on a layover like an old friend.