looking back

recapping the year of heart

This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. I’m skipping recording this week because it’s January, and I’m so tired…if I wait to record and edit this post, you might not see it until March!

If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it!

Beware what word you make a word of the year because you’ll start seeing it everywhere!

As I’ve made abundantly clear here over the years, I think all of January is for reflecting. Despite my own admonishments to everybody else, I still find myself feeling behind when the first week of January comes around every year. Our family reeeally leans into relaxation and rest that week between Christmas and New Years. I do some reflecting, but it feels like I need the whole month to adequately look back on the year gone by. I save resolutions for the energy of spring, but the turning of the calendar year¹ is a time that seems thirsty for reflection. One of my favorite quotes is from John Dewey who says, “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience,” so I like to lean hard into the reflecting that the winter season invites us into.

I hadn’t done a word of the year in awhile, but last January, I decided that 2024 would be the year of heart. Not the year of the heart, but the year of heart. That distinction felt different and somehow important to me, but even now I can’t quite articulate why. For the last year, even when I didn’t want to, I used my mindfulness time to do metta meditation or other heart-focused meditations. I read books and watched movies that caught my attention if they had the word heart in the title. I paid more attention to my own heart. I tried to be more open and soft-hearted to myself and to others.

I’m a frequent crier anyway, but this year, I found myself in tears even more frequently. My emotions seemed closer to the surface. In the fall, a friend asked how my year of heart was going, and I told her that I wasn’t sure but that I was feeling less boundaried - like I was picking up what everyone, especially my family, was feeling. Her response? Well, you are the one who made it the year of the heart.

It was a weird year. I think most of us would agree. For me personally, our oldest started high school, and I wasn’t prepared for how strange and hard that transition was (is). Both of our favorite places - our home and western North Carolina faced devastation this year². Politics here at home and around the world was bonkers. Trump won again. I didn’t write as much as usual - and my mental state reflected it.

But underneath it all, I kept leaning into my heart. Learning about how the heart has its own intelligence that most of us Westerners have neglected for the last three millennia or so. Taking a pause when I felt tense or anxious (or at least occasionally taking a pause!) and checking in with my heart, not just my head or my breath. Noticing how even my own heart space has different levels and energies that I can tap into if I’m paying attention. Realizing how often I act without any consideration of my heart-mind. Learning to better recognize what the voice of my intuition sounds like, with less self-doubt afterwards (although still plenty of self-doubt to be clear!).

I don’t feel radically more in touch with my heart after this year, but I do feel softer toward myself -- and I’m hoping that spills over to others. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I don’t want to spend the next Trump term, and I think this year of heart prepared me for the softness that whatever is coming requires.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard several people on various podcasts quote alternately john a. powell or Tim Wise advising us to “be hard on systems and soft on people” as we move forward. My year of heart has better prepared me - at least for the softer on people side of the equation. I’ve written plenty here about our systems problems and naming the systems as problems instead of the individuals involved is a good first step, but it doesn’t do much to move us forward. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to practically be softer on people and harder on systems³.

In this podcast conversation⁴,

Elise Loehnen

is interviewing Father Gregory Boyle, who I think of as one of the great spiritual teachers of our age. Loehnen asks Father Greg about this realization that he had when he saw a woman wearing a “love not hate” t-shirt, and Father Greg responds:

I remember saying that I had this insight as soon as I saw the t-shirt. I thought that's why we don't make progress, partly because if I wore a t-shirt that said love, not hate, it would, I think, principally be about me, and it can't be about me. And then it also sets up that I belong to the group that loves, and I stand against the group that hates, and I think precisely because it draws lines instead of erases them, that is why we don't make progress.

Later in the conversation, he continues:

So humans are always drawing lines and we're being invited constantly to erase them. So that's where we need to be. We need to be where anything that drives a wedge between us needs to be bridged instead because we want to obliterate the illusion that we are separate.

As the conversation concludes, Loehnen asks him, “If you were to minister to our entire country, what would you prescribe?” The final part of the conversation is so good that it is worth quoting in its entirety:

FATHER GREG:

Yeah. Well, I also feel like the starting point are those two principles because if you don't believe that everybody's unshakably good, then you have to demonize the other. And if you don't believe that we belong to each other, then you have to be about excluding people. And that's why we don't make progress. One of the reasons is because it's the opposite of those things are indeed true, unshakably good, even Donald Trump. Now there are people who can't see it, can't recognize it, and that will come if we help each other walk towards wellness and health. But that's kind of the problem is that they can't see it.

ELISE:

And I think when people hear something like Donald Trump is unshakably good, people's heads spin off in part because they feel like acknowledging that means accepting his behavior or exonerating it or saying, oh, this is fine or okay, and there's a distinction⁵.

FATHER GREG:

Well, because I've worked with gang members, I've never met anybody evil, ever, ever, ever, ever. Now I've met people who've done horrible things, but I know enough to know that none of it has to do with morality or their goodness. It has to do with a wide variety of factors. The moral quest has never kept us moral. It's just kept us from each other. And so that's the whole point because the morality of he's a bad person, and I'm a good person. Yeah, that's why this isn't working. He [Trump] had a Thanksgiving message where it was a rant, and it was just off the wall. And I don't go, what a jerk.

Last Christmas, he sent a tweet or whatever they're called that said, “Merry Christmas and may all my enemies rot in hell.” Now I look at that and I don't go, wow, what a bad guy. I look at that and I go, nobody healthy has ever said that, ever. I know. If he were my father, all my siblings and I have seven of them, we would sit down with him and we'd say, dad, no, we love you. You can't run for president because you're not whole. You're not well, you're not healthy.

How can we get you back to a place of wholeness? No one needs to be a psychiatrist to know that this is illness, but you do have to be well to know that he isn't. And that's the key. You don't have to go to Harvard to know that he isn't. And you don't have to be a psychiatrist. You just have to be. Well, none of us are well until all of us are well. So how do we help each other move towards the wholeness that we're all distant? That's why we're walking each other home to that.

////

Father Greg seems to be talking about the “soft on people” side of the equation too - the yin side of things, so to speak. There is space and time for contemplating what it looks like to be hard on systems and structures - the yang side of the work. That feels like a necessary part of the conversation to be sure.

But as I look back on my year of heart, I find myself leaning into this tenderness that the past year has germinated in me. My year of heart made my heart more open, softer, more tender, and I want that to be the foundation for whatever 2025 and beyond brings.

Scattering Seeds

I usually have stuff that I want to share that doesn’t fit in the main post + I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

Favorite heart practices. These were the practices that I returned to again and again last year:

• Golden Healing Heart Coherence - Dr. Rhea Komarek

• The light of true love in your heart - John Siddique

• Heart: IFS - Richard Schwartz

• Heart meditation - Sura Flow

• My go-to metta teacher is Sharon Salzberg

It starts with me. In my experience, when I have more self-compassion, I have more to access for others. This is one of the weird, mysterious gifts of being kinder to yourself - there is a spillover effect on others. I felt the same way about being more connected to my heart wisdom. I had more tenderness for myself, and (occassionally at least) I had access to more of my intuition/inner wisdom. It felt like, just as with self-compassion, there was a spillover effect that enabled me to be more tender with others and tap into my inner wisdom instead of rushing to judgement - again, occasionally.

Tender and fierce. In part of my reflecting on my year of heart, I noticed too that I felt more grounded, even fiercer in some aspects of my inner life and relationships. I honestly haven’t fleshed out what connection that has to my intentions around my heart last year, but I remembered that the queen of self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff, came out with a book a few years ago titled Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive, so I’ll tackle reading that and see what connections it might stir up.

Here’s to being softer with ourselves - let’s start there and see what happens!

Sara

1. Even if the Gregorian calendar that we use today is pretty arbitrary and relatively new in the course of human history.

2. I’m certainly not comparing the destruction at our place to the destruction, loss of life, and continued unraveling that Hurricane Helene caused in WNC and eastern Tennessee. I’m just saying that both of our favorite places in the world faced destruction this year. Both, ultimately, were caused by greed and anthropocentrism if you ask me.

3. I finally finished Ken Wilber’s A Post-Truth World: Politics, Polarization, and a Vision for Transcending the Chaos, which I honestly wish I didn’t recommend because, as I told Grant while I was reading it, I’ve never agreed so much with a book whose author I simultaneously found so annoying. Unfortunately, I do strongly encourage you to read it because it gives a better explanation for the forces that got us here than anything else I’ve come across. Wilber also has some practical ways forward for us collectively to find this softer on people/harder on systems dynamic.

4. Listen to the whole thing. I sent it to Grant, saying that I think we should be required to listen to this once a month in the coming Trump term.

5. This is why I love listening to Elise interview people because she asks the questions I’m yelling in my head.