A Different Way to Begin
January comes, and on the calendars we keep, it is the new year. It comes with a particular quality of light here in the north. Pale. Slanted. The kind that doesn’t quite warm what it touches. It comes with bodies that are still holding the shape of what they carried through December. With nervous systems that haven’t finished settling. With questions that didn’t resolve just because the calendar turned.
January does not feel like a beginning in the body.
It feels like standing in a doorway with your coat still on.
Like the pause after something ends, before anything else has gathered enough shape to begin.
Like being asked to move forward while part of you is still turned toward what hasn’t been set down yet.
And yet, this is the month that insists on clarity.
On improvement.
On momentum.
On a clean start.
January asks us to speak before we’ve listened.
To decide before we’ve felt.
To declare who we’re becoming while parts of us are still catching their breath.
For many of us, this creates a quiet dissonance.
A sense that something is being rushed.
That the timing is off.
Because January, if you listen closely, is not a launch.
It’s an aftermath.
An aftermath of a year lived.
An aftermath of grief, illness, caretaking, adaptation.
An aftermath of surviving things that didn’t come with neat conclusions.
There is often a pausing and reorientation here.
A rawness.
A fatigue that doesn’t mean failure, only that something real has been carried for a long time.
The lie is not January itself.
The lie is what we are told to do inside it.
There is another way to be here.
It doesn’t begin with goals or resolutions.
It begins with contact.
Contact with the body as it is right now, not as it should be by now.
Contact with the pace your system is actually moving at.
Contact with the small signals that have been speaking all along: sensations, images, instincts, the half-formed knowing that hasn’t found language yet.
Contact is different from improvement.
It does not ask you to change.
It asks you to arrive.
When you make contact, attention settles.
Not sharply.
Not forcefully.
But like weight finding a surface that can hold it.
In this kind of attention, time behaves differently.
It slows enough for things to reveal themselves.
A feeling completes its arc.
A question clarifies simply by being allowed to exist.
A desire you’ve been circling without naming steps a little closer.
Nothing is demanded.
Nothing is optimized.
You are simply here, in relationship.
This is how many traditions understood this season.
Winter was not a problem to solve or a delay to endure.
It was a condition to live inside.
The work was presence.
Small rituals.
Repeated gestures.
Ways of marking time that didn’t hurry it along.
Ways of staying oriented when the path ahead wasn’t visible yet.
This is the lineage slow magic comes from.
Not spectacle.
Not certainty.
But the ordinary, human practices that help us stay in contact with ourselves and with the living world when clarity is unavailable.
Lighting something.
Touching water.
Writing a few true words.
Making something with your hands without needing to justify it.
Noticing what responds when you do.
Slow magic does not ask January to be something else.
It meets it where it is.
On January 2nd, I’m beginning The Deck of Slow Magic.
It’s a year-long practice made up of weekly letters and simple spells.
Not spells meant to produce outcomes, but spells that create places you can stand.
Places of attention.
Places of contact.
Each week offers a small threshold.
Something to notice.
Something to tend.
Something to return to when the world feels too fast or too loud or too demanding.
There is no promise of improvement here.
No expectation of readiness.
No requirement to keep pace.
Only an invitation to practice being in relationship: with your body, with time, with what is quietly asking for you.
January does not need you to reinvent yourself.
It needs you to be here.
And presence, practiced slowly and over time, has a way of changing what matters most, without ever forcing it.
If this feels like the way you want to enter the year, you’re welcome to join us.
We circle January 2nd.
beautiful truth