If you've been playing along at home for any length of time, you will know I delight in disrupting systems and ideas around time and years. For the last few years there has been a pull toward something new -- and while I can say I didn't know what it was, I actually did. The problem (if one is prone to looking for obstacles to justify not changing!) was the new year calling to me had no real proximity to the new year.

The new year calling to me was the Vernal Equinox but something inside me could not justify the shift.

It turns out the disrupter prefers not venture too far from the shore. From the known.

Then 2022 happened.

THE EPIC LOW TIDE MARK

On the 1st February, the beginning of the Year of the Black Tiger, I was so exhausted, the tide was so far out, I felt out-of-bounds. A few days later, when the energy wasn't shifting off the low tide mark, I knew I wasn't in the delineated liminal zone of the "month between years". I was -- well, who the fuck knows where I was. I certainly didn't. All I knew was I was lost out on the epic low tide mark with no energy to find a way forward.

But being so far from the logical concept of a new year, freed me. It let me follow the call to start my year with the Vernal Equinox.

NOWRUZ

Just in case I needed one last blessing for the decision, last night, when I flipped my calendar from February to March (if that's any indication of just how out of flow I've been with everything) I saw the 21st was not just equinox and the astrological new year but also the Persian New Year --nowruz (which roughly translates as new day).

One of the practices I've been doing in this out-of-bounds space was working with my copy of Hafiz, Christina's process of pulling a question from the poem and doing a black-out-poem based on the question.

Having already decided on a year with a Persian mystic-poet...well, to discover the Persian New Year... let's just say, I have zero doubts this is the perfect-for-me start. I know that when I'm on an aligned path, synchronicities light up reality like a asteroid shower.

And woah -- yeah -- I can actually feel the rise of the energy this morning. It doesn't matter that today marks the start of Autumn and the turning inward. As an Aries rising soul, it feels fitting to actually start here. The more I venture into the world, on my own terms, the more I feel as though I function best from that Aries placement.

For 2022, I chose the mantra: thrive in the sun, rest in the shade. But it really felt like an invitation to turn toward the sun, and orientate by it.  When I eventually got around to pulling an anchor card for the year, I pulled The Sun. It's moments like that which reinforce the profound beauty and simplicity of synchronicity as a vehicle of magick

Perhaps this is what the little intuitive voice inside me was trying to articulate -- to move with the sun through the zodiac, while also honouring the cycles of the moon (which I've been using as my creative and business calendar to brilliant effect).

This means today officially marks the beginning of my Depth Year (only four months after first deciding I would embark on one).

And you know -- because found poetry can have a no bullshit voice, the poem I created to honour the quickening of a new year says:

Go deep for value and enrichment

despite your fascination with

being half-assed

own what you've already started

1. I'm kicking off my depth year with returning to the gentle wisdom and process in Alex Elle's Begin Again, writing for healing course which I started with Christina in November and only got to the end of Week 2.
2. It's time to finish the tarot poems I started in April with @crowsister's 10 True Words. (I think I only have 10 poems left and I'm *so* ready to finally use the deck for tarot.)
   
3. I'm going to build the personal-professional website I have spent almost 13 years avoiding. Without the fall back of the Soul Lyrical website (which I lost during Mercury Rx last year!) it is time to stop pissing about. With a definitive move from social media, it is time to invest in the final part of building myself a stable foundation to grow from.
4. And last but not least, I am blowing the dust off the fire chapter of The Re-Authored Life to finally use the resource I created at the end of 2020. (If you'd like to purchase the entire workbook, it's $33, but you'll need to contact me as there's currently nowhere to sell it directly -- refer to point 3!)

Even if you're not starting a new year today, perhaps it's time for a jump-start or a refresh. The quarter days (equinoxes and solstices, are definitive points in time and it's worth taking a moment to check in and see if you haven't incrementally veered away from where you wanted to go. Or maybe it is time to strike out on a brand new path?)

Chani Nicholas offered a small but powerful tool in her newsletter last week. Simply ask: What do you want more of? What do you want less of?

I've done it as a list of five for each and pulled two tarot cards to go deeper into the why underlying what I want more/less of.

MORE OF THIS AND LESS OF THAT

And on that topic, I've left social media for an extended time.

I need to focus on where I can be seen, where I feel safe being seen and where I know I have the space, support and love to truly thrive (I've always been more an intimate circle kind of person and less a big party girl). This will give me the opportunity to write to you more here, offer more on Patreon and build that home-base website.

It will hopefully also free up some energy to invite new clients in for life coaching as I draw closer to the end of the third draft of What I Left to Forget. (If you think that might be you -- hit reply and we can chat to see if we're a good fit for each other).

Sending you all lashing of love and equinox blessings,

Jodi xxx

PS: An after-thought. We talk about "new beginnings" but isn't that a tautology, because we don't ever speak of "old beginnings". Perhaps that's an idea for a story somewhere down the line: the repository of old beginnings and other forgotten treasures.