Thresholds & A Full Moon

On Care, Home, and the Practice of Receiving.

This was written under the Cancer full moon, and I find myself thinking about care, creativity, and belonging in an intimate way as we cross this threshold time of a new year. These themes no longer feel like abstract ideals, but like living questions that reach into my daily life, my relationships, and my body seeking answers. As I reject the hop, skip, jump, leap into the new year: how can we embody care and belonging in the now?

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

Sylvia Plath

Winter roses, blooming on Christmas. I forget these were the winters of my childhood, not even close to snow dusted.

This year of the snake has felt like a huge question mark, no joke. An upheaval of the very foundations of what I thought I knew. Deeply unmooring. I shed comfort and familiarity, beginning with the decision to sell the house we spent years dreaming up and once believed would hold us forever. I released time and commitments in this space and other online spaces so I could hurt and heal in privacy, leaving behind the impulse to perform my grief. I shed comfort and familiarity.

Letting go of the land and the home felt like leaving behind parts of my identity. I am still in the process of re-membering my self, gathering the scattered pieces slowly and deliberately. I have returned to the people, places, and plants I loved before, trusting that what is true will recognize me again. Through loss, this year revealed unexpected openings: invitations to take new paths, to soften into belonging, and to loosen the grip on old ideas of who I am supposed to be. None of this happened quickly. I spent long stretches feeling stuck, overcome by tears more times than I can count.

Care Beyond Self-Sufficiency

Cancer, as an archetype, governs home, memory, lineage, and emotional safety. Under this moon, I see clearly the places where I have learned to be self-sufficient, where I have told myself that I am fine on my own, and where those protective instincts have quietly kept my needs from being deeply met.

I begin to wonder: is the way I care for others the same way I care for myself— do I allow myself to be cared for at all? Do you extend the same care to yourself that you so freely offer others?

Monterey, California. A place my dad spent his childhood years. A place I spent summers and now I get to share the landscapes with my own children.

When I listen closely, care reveals itself not as maintenance, but as daily devotion, turning attention to what I value and to what matters and to what I love. It is a fierce attentiveness to what is tender and alive. Can you or I see or honor that love and aliveness within ourselves? Yet I also recognize how my devotion to self protection has taken the form of walls, built slowly and unconsciously, over time and through tumult. Those walls, I felt, kept me safe, but they also kept me untouched.

Belonging asks for something else entirely. It asks for a softening that allows light and reflection to permeate, a moment of recognition when we see parts of ourselves mirrored in another, requiring the courage to be seen, to be more vulnerable and to allow another’s presence to rearrange me. To belong is to accept that I may not remain intact in the familiar ways I have relied upon.

Surrendering Control

This year, I found myself teetering on the edge of breakdowns and breakups. A threshold year. In those moments, I learned to surrender to the alchemical processes of change rather than try to control outcomes. There were times when life felt like more than I could process. But more often than not, the joys, the experiences, the aliveness, the connection with new and old kindred hearts outweighed the sorrow. It was in this messy, murky in-between that I learned how not to micromanage life and instead become a vessel for it to move through me.

Father and son at the Pacific Ocean. Vast and unknowable.

It was in that uncertain, in-between terrain that I learned how to let experiences move through me rather than harden against them.

Different situations and scenarios illuminated how difficult it can be to let someone work their magic on me. To trust that I don’t need to manage every outcome. To believe that care can hold me without consuming me. I had to breakdown, to surrender.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final

Rainer Maria Rilke

Magic often arrives from the vast nothingness, the void in between the fear and the wonder, when we least expect it.

When I listen to conversations about manifestation especially through a Western lens it often centers individualism, control, on directing reality through will and effort, and so little reverence for care, belonging, or interdependence. That narrative has never matched my lived experience. The most meaningful shifts in my life didn’t come from force. They arrived through tending to relationship; to being softened, protected, and shaped by other forces, human and more than human love.

Reimagining Home and Belonging

We are taught, often subtly or not so subtly, that care and love are scarce resources, that tenderness is costly, and that self-sufficiency is the highest form of strength. Under this Cancer full moon, in this current political climate, and in this new year, those teachings feel thin and worn out, ready to be tossed for a fresh start.

Lights, shadows, texture, colors of a sunrise near the coast.

This holiday season, I spent time with my family, traveling along the coast of California and visiting the places where my father grew up and where I spent summers with my grandmother. Touched by sandy landscapes of memory and belonging, with each swell of the salt kissed waves, I felt a sense of home returning to my body. After a year of profound change, and after releasing the home we built, I realized that home has been calling to me in a multitude of forms.

I find myself asking what becomes possible when home is no longer defined as a singular place, but as a constellation of people, plants, landscapes, and memories?When home is understood as the places and beings our heartlines have crisscrossed, the lens of our belonging widens. It becomes less about possession and more about relationship and a connection that cannot be so easily severed.

The Magic of Reception

I continue to imagine a different kind of surrender, one that is neither collapse nor erasure. A yielding that creates space for something new to arrive to inhabit our hearts. I wonder what might change if I stopped pushing so hard, striving for my heart’s desires, and instead allowed softness and pleasure to guide me.

To me, magic has always felt less like command. The way our feeling is translated into form through our hands, hearts—our human expression. Yet this magic has grown harder to access in a world that is increasingly mediated by technology, accelerated by consumerism, automated and disembodied. Our attention is fragmented, our intuition becomes deadened and our creativity is outsourced what is left in our well for us to create? The power of dreaming is diminished. Even winter, once a season of inwardness, now competes with constant illumination. How can we breathe life into ourselves and each other? Allowing ourselves to be emptied, to be filled up. The waves crashing upon the shore and receding.

Redwood trees that have grown with me, I remember when these were just saplings.

I wonder how we can truly co-create if we only make room for our own effort, and not for community, collaboration, or for the inspiration and influence of the world around us to participate in the expression of love and creativity. I think what fades in this climate is the intimacy of making.

The knowledge to work our magic, I wholeheartedly trust, still lives in our bodies. If we can get really quiet, we return to what moves us. These technologies of care are the ways of expressing our humanity: making meals, painting a sunrise, in crafting, through touch, making love, and in the fulfilling satisfaction of using our hands to nourish, repair, and build. They are the spells we cast through touch, rhythm, repetition and presence. These acts return me to myself even as they weave me into the web of what is expansive, larger than my singular being.

Practicing Reception

In twenty-twenty five, I found I no longer wanted to capture and curate every moment of my life. I wanted to inhabit my moments more fully. As I look through the door of twenty-twenty six, I know still want to create and share, but I am seeking a more honest balance and I'm discerning the direction in which my attention is pointed. Sorting through photographs recently offered me a space for reflection and reminded me, Winter, is not meant for rushing ahead. This season is a time for integration, for releasing our grasp, and for settling into the uncertainty of what comes next. What comes when we allow ourselves to swim in the diffuse waters of dreaming? This sacred threshold asks to be honored not rushed through. It asks us to remember that doing is not the only way life and experience moves through us.

This year felt like a quest. Despite my environment, and despite the chaos of this changing world, I came home to myself.

I missed running my hands of hedges of winter Lavender, plucking flowers for keeps.

This January, I am practicing the art of reception. Relinquishing a need to control. A resolve to trust in something larger than my self. Embodying the belief that softness can be generative and that fierce care does not always require armor. I am remembering that meaning does not always arrive through striving, effort or will. Some things come only when we make space in our hearts, and soften enough to receive them. Not all intentions need loud declarations. Some work best when entrusted to time, ancestors, nature, and silence.

And perhaps that, too, is magic.

There are years that’s asked questions and there are years that answered

Zora Hurston Neale

I wonder what this year holds, for you & for me: questions or answers…

If you’ve read to the end, thank you for being here and valuing my words and work. Thank you for sticking out the rollercoaster of twenty-twenty five.

in deep gratitude & friendship, Alyson xx.