We’re almost there my friends. We’re at the finish line of 2020: the craziest, weirdest, most tumultuous, contentious, painful, scary, exhausting year that most of us have ever seen.

One of the more obvious and trying aspects of this pandemic we’re floundering in is all the things we can’t do. This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen.

We’ve crossed the Winter Solstice. (The best day of winter, in my opinion. The light’s coming back. Gives one hope.) Christmas has come and gone and the ceaseless conveyor belt of time carries us on into a brave new year, a year that one can only pray will include an impeachment hearing.

One of my favorite quotes, torn and taped to my desk, is this one, attributed to Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

My eggs have all hatched. This is what I thought last week as I sat on the porch in the morning, my children back in school. I thought about them being gone, and about my book being finished, and my mother entering the last chapter of her life. I sat and I thought about a lot of things that have to do with the period of seemingly empty time between the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

I was very excited, at the beginning of this year, to welcome 2012. February would usher in the Year of the Dragon, an auspicious year, a year of power and dynamism. Having been born in a dragon year, I gleefully anticipated doubly good fortune with health, wealth, and a book deal raining down from the heavens.

Winter is arrived, wrapping us in the deepest darkness.  The sun sits suspended on an invisible threshold, its solstice marking both an end and a beginning, a tipping point.  The power, the crisis of this moment, was keenly felt by our ancestors.