I do not need a calendar to make a year visible. Some years simply finish announcing themselves around now — high points I did not fully appreciate at the time, hard stretches that are mercifully behind me, and a handful of specific moments that I am only beginning to understand the shape of. This entry is one of those moments.
2025 was a year I am glad to have survived. That is not dramatic — it is simply, accurately true. There were months earlier in the year that were genuinely difficult in ways I'm choosing not to catalog here, because some chapters you close and leave closed, and the closing is itself a form of wisdom. I navigated them. I came back to Santa Fe in August. I moved into a new place that felt, from the first morning, like mine — not in a temporary or provisional way, but in the specific, settled way that some spaces claim you. I recovered. I chose, every day and sometimes every hour, to be okay, and eventually being okay wasn't a daily declaration anymore. It was just the state I was in.
By December, I was writing again — not notes and fragments, but real writing. Full poems, full thoughts, pages that went somewhere. The creative brain, which had been running on reserve power for most of the year and deserves a commendation for its resilience, came back on fully. The poems were different after 2025. Sharper in some places. More patient in others. Hard seasons do something to the writing, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. The reader can usually tell when a poem was written from inside something real versus from the safe side of it.
The fleeting arc: a rainbow is a rainbow precisely because it won't stay. Its power lives entirely in its brevity. The full moon is more moving when it's near the horizon — when it's so close you could theoretically reach it and you know by morning it'll be overhead and ordinary again. We are a species genuinely built to love impermanence while doing everything in our considerable power to resist it. I understand both impulses completely and feel no obligation to resolve the contradiction.
The Fleeting Arc
Colors stretch across the sky, A bridge that forms then waves goodbye, Moments bright, then fade to dark, Gone before we leave a mark.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →December 2025 was full of things I was glad were fleeting — stress, the accumulated weight of a year that had been heavier than I wanted, certain very specific conversations I never need to have again — and also full of things I hoped would somehow stay: good food, warm evenings, the sound my house makes when it's settled and quiet, family close, the particular quality of December light in Santa Fe when the low sun hits the adobe walls at 4 p.m. and everything goes briefly, spectacularly gold.
I am a person who chooses happiness. I say this as a practice, not a platitude. There is a distinction and it matters enormously. Some days in 2025, that choosing was effortful in the way a real workout is effortful — not impossible, but it required something of me. By December, the strength was back. The muscle had been built by months of using it. The choosing was easier, not because the year had been easy, but because I had done the work. You get better at the thing you practice. Even this.
Let 2025 go with both hands and no apology. It taught you what it came to teach. The arc dissolved — and you are richer for having seen it, and wiser for having stayed through the rain that made it possible. A clean sky now. Whatever comes next.