Hi Friend,
In my last note, I talked about the importance of seed sorting and storytelling during this winter season.
Perhaps because seed sorting is related to making meaning, it can sometimes feel like a bit of a messy process. After all, a lot happened in 2025: major things shifted and changed at national, global, local, and community levels. And it keeps on happening. Overwhelm can flood our capacity for effective meaning-making - especially storytelling that gives room for nuance and complexity and multiplicity of thought and experience.
I've taken some extra time this year to consider what happened in 2025 - as always, finding our Circular Time process quite supportive in doing so. In large part because so much happened, and I certainly have not integrated all of it by any means, I decided to try something a bit different: to offer a public reflection on 2025 that, like our Circular Time work in general, leans into the wholeness of ourselves. We are, afterall, ecological beings and spiritual beings; participating in various forms of work, family, neighborhoods, and nations. And thus of births and deaths and marriages and opportunities to mentor and to receive different forms of mentoring.
As so much of our work at Sequoia Samanvaya also stands in the spiritual truth that we do not and need not experience walking this messy-mystical path of unlearning and remembering alone, I asked my friend and former student, Gayano Shaw, to join me in this sharing about some of my reflection on 2025.
To prepare, I created my own circular time calendar, which includes looking anew at the categories that are shaping my time.... and then I ended up writing up a document reflecting on trends and observations. I wrote 17 pages, unaided by AI. (Though I did do some work with AI to help myself review some of what has happened politically.... which was helpful.)
My year included six significant deaths in six months (my first 'new' category for myself was 'death'); much deeper engagement with ritual and liminal spaces as well as some new client work. And then there's the larger trends, which are still upon us, of national defunding that which supports care (of our climate, of one another) and science and funding instead that which supports fear including narrow, narcissistic forms of power and technology. So really 17 pages wasn't that much.
Of course, Gayano and I couldn't get through all of that in a reasonably short time that would make for a halfway decent podcast episode. As it was we talked for over two hours, which I've edited down a wee bit, because do you really want to listen to us talk for over 2 hours? ( I have to say Gayano is very easy to talk to!) I could make caveats for this episode - I didn't get nearly as much into my own political commentary that I had wanted to, there were a lot of insights I had in my written reflection that didn't get into our conversation.... etc etc etc) but that's not the point. so, I'll just say this in- the midst -of -everything was rich for both of us. I hope there's something here that's enticing and supportive for you as well. Michael, our associate who does the editing of the podcast , says it’s one of my more vulnerable episodes. It feels like the beginning of something ... and one of the things I know about origin stories is that it is sometimes hard to know what the story ‘really is’ until later.
