"In this new year, may we rally the courage to finally begin what we've held only in our dreams, and the tenderness to root it in compassion. May we remember our interconnection, shared joy, and love for the world, building our future accordingly." 

That's from the conclusion of Juliana McCarthy's New Year's Eve email on the Astrology of 2026  (the link is for the extended article including the quote -- she's one of my favorite astrologers, has been for years, for her analysis and her optimism and the poetry in the way she expresses how she understands the astrology; you should read it if you're looking for hope to spark your faith in what this year can bring you/us/the world) but I liked it as a prayer and intention and mantra for the year to come. So I wanted to share it because it puts into words what I desire to be chosen in this coming year -- chosen by me and by my polar bear and by everyone I care about and everyone I don't yet know well enough to care about in a personal way. 

 

So just one little thing I wanted to say in case it was misunderstood: me saying that when i made my choices to try to leave and/or deaden the bond it was always at times he was genuinely believing he'd found the love of his life in another woman or he has been making plans for his career wherein I am made to feel not welcomed or wanted so there's no place for me within his life, I didn't mean that in a shifting blame way or anything. I take accountability of my own choices and my own actions and I am the one who has chosen in those past times to try to pull away and quiet the bond while I  leave. Those are my choices -- regardless my reasons I felt I had for it, I was the one who made those choices and I am the one who did it. I said it because... it matters to me that you understand it was never anything out of intentional cruelty or even abandoning him when I could afterward feel the turmoil and sorrow/pain it generated in him when the connection felt disappeared or unreachable to him. I only ever did it at times when I genuinely believed because he genuinely believed that he was going to choose a future path for him on which there was no place for me, paths that led away from us reuniting in the real world quotidian this lifetime. I only ever acted that way from the place of thinking he was genuinely choosing what he wanted for himself and I was trying to do the best by both of us that I could given that truth of his choices. I genuinely thought at such times that i was doing the best I could by the both of us given his choices and what he internally believed at the time about those choices. I didn't expect him to notice, let alone be upset, by my choices to disengage and try to put the bond dormant during the times I believed there to be no place for me in the life he was building himself with the choices he was making. There is no time I have acted in that way in knowledge and belief that it would upset or hurt him for me to be trying to dim or deaden the bond. 

 And I just want to be clear about that. 

 We are all of us, no matter our gifts or our abilities to occasionally transcend into the collective unconscious and the allness of everything, still constrained by our own subjective lenses of what we can know and see and believe. None of us are omniscient while incarnating. And I never once made that choice while knowing or believing that my actions were going to cause him distress to lose the flow of the bond between us.  I always did so in the belief that I was accepting his genuine choices (and/or those he allowed to be made for him) for himself and doing what would be best by the both of us given those choices for his life path. 

It doesn't mean I was right, it doesn't mean I wasn't mistaken, it doesn't mean I didn't cause quite a lot of unhappiness and distress in both of us by choosing to try to give up on the bond and put it to sleep for this lifetime.... But I never meant to do any of those things and I certainly never meant to cause him any pain and I thought only I would pay for choosing to give up on what I desired most in this lifetime. And, I definitely have a very Spartan stoic streak to my character of accepting cruelty I inflict on my own self and denying my own desires in the name of doing what I believe to be ethically right... It doesn't extend to cruelty toward others, but it does toward myself. Which is why I say I knew how deeply it would hurt me to try to deaden the bond and give up on it for this lifetime, but I didn't believe it would upset him or believe he would even notice given his choices for himself. 

I can't undo the past but I can learn from it to try to do better now and in the future. And I think that me believing there's no place for me in his life has hurt us both and sown much despair in both our hearts and I don't want to choose that any longer. He's free to choose what he wants and I admit I don't know what that is right now (all I'm getting from him via the bond is certainty and commitment to whatever he's set his heart on and sudden unexpected outpouring floods of love from him down the bond -- but I have no idea what that translates into in his everyday choices and actions) but for MY choices I'm choosing to question that idea I thought an insurmountable block and to stop believing there's no place for me in his life and instead focus on how we could create space for me in his life and space for him in mine and to try to figure out how we bring our life paths together moving forward.  For as long as he wants that. (I'm not changeable, I always want that. Have always wanted it and will always want it. In all the tenses. But I'll only fight for trying to to make it real so long as it's also what he wants, what he would choose for himself.)