My tradition for the week between Christmas and New Year’s is a long-standing one…I use this time to clear out the dregs of the year that is passing away and to make space for the new and wonderful opportunities and experiences of the upcoming fresh, clean calendar year.  This ritual usually takes the form of closet cleaning, book-shelf weeding, paper-filing, project-finishing, etc. — you get the general idea.  All activities designed to eliminate whatever is holding me back from my highest potential and to make room for my good to spring forth.

So I will continue this ritual because it has always worked for me:  it focuses my mind, it invites me to complete a strenuous personal inventory, it invites me to open up both my head and my heart to new ways of perceiving and feeling.

But something this year is radically different.  Perhaps it is all of this study of the structure of the liturgical year and the lectionary–in so many ways, the new year has already started for me.  Maybe it truly is the fact that the year 2010 was the final death of the kind of magical thinking that was ingrained in me from my years with the Unity School of Religious Science (while there is much that I learned there that is still worthwhile, the mode of magical thinking that is so prevelant has been a most destructive force in my life).

Whatever the reason, somehow, for me, the year has already begun.  So, I suppose that I had better get to work…