Looking back on my post from a year ago, I feel a fondness for the woman I was. Her sentences were so declarative, her sadness so entrenched, her determination so surprising. She did the hard thing and now I’m here, seeing the whole path of my living through the soft blur that comes when you adjust the lens to expand your scope, to focus on something different. I am different now. There is little else that I’m certain of.

I’m coming back to this secret blog in the aftermath of a failed December project, which I intended as the successor of last year’s Body Days project. It seemed to me then that the December and January project pairing would be something I would do in some form for the rest of my life, which was naive. The truth is that the project I concieved of was just not interesting enough.

For the first two weeks of this month, I sat down with myself and wrote a half page answering the question If you imagined healing not as a thought, or an idea, but as a sensory experience, what would it feel like, smell like, sound like, for you and for the world? (I stole the idea from Amanda Yeats Garcia’s Substack.) This in the midst of a genocide, asking myself as an unemployed person, sitting next to my display of the objects I created for Body Days. My answers were repetitive: embodiment, awareness, compassion. Seeing, smelling, feeling all the beautiful things that are part of being a human being alive on earth. Being freshly showered. Drinking fresh water. It boils down to having the capacity and support to show up as your best self, always.

Even though I stopped sitting down to answer the question every day, I learned enough from it to trigger some behavioral changes. I’m stepping up my embodiment practice, noticing more gratitude, thinking every day of a free Palestine. When I’m having a rough time I step back and notice where I need more support. So maybe the project served its purpose.

I believe now that my healing is inevitable, whereas in the past I would just use the phrase as a mantra to soothe myself on my worst days. I believe that my healing is inevitable because it is happening, every day, even on days when I’m weeping while I eat my toast in the morning. There is a point where asking yourself to imagine something that is already happening interferes with your awareness of the experience as it unfolds. If I had to pinpoint it, that is where the project “failed.”

So where does ritual stand, now that this 2023 transformation has occurred? Do the ritual until it stops working, but work on having the awareness to understand the difference between internal resistance and no longer needing the ceremony. It’s all compassionate inquiry here. It’s all compassion.