Friends, it’s been a wild and frightening ride already. Every time I open social media, somebody’s posting about some alarming new development. I barely have the heart to read the news—my body and emotions struggle to get through even a headline or two.

My spiritual director recently asked me to consider a word, phrase, image, or posture that might be beckoning me into 2025. During our session last week, before I even had a chance to name it, she said it aloud in her prayer for me: spaciousness.

During that time, she also facilitated a practice that can be helpful when visiting or revisiting difficult emotions and experiences, including the news. You start by imagining a grounding, nourishing experience, one where you feel loved, held, and connected. You enter into that experience with all five senses. You ask what Creator might want to show you in and through that experience.

From that grounded, connected place, you visit the difficult emotion or experience you desire to process, again being open to how God might show up there, in the muck and mire.

What if, before we opened up social media or the news, we started by grounding ourselves in our five senses, creation, community, and Creator? How might that change how we receive the news, and what we do with it?

I love this artist’s approach to the news. Click below to flip through their Instagram post.

sarahholstart

A post shared by @sarahholstart

Below, I offer a poem that also seeks healthier postures for these unrelenting times.

Spaciousness

When all the world comes crowding in
the firehose of bad news spewing into every waking moment
The underground torrent of generational trauma
threatening to burst its reservoirs
already flooding your subconscious

Consider 
how a tree holds space
its limbs dancing to the wind's onslaught
creating pockets of calm within its leaves and boughs

Or the sea grasses
moving, swaying, sashaying with the tide 
the waves crash yet the grasses shelter
small, unmoored creatures
in folds of shimmering weightlessness

Or the moon, a pool of stillness
catching the eye of many an earthling
scuttling about a teeming surface
holding each one in a gentle lunar embrace

So you, too, can learn
to dance, bend, pause, shift your weight
to reflect the light you've been given
to try a new posture
to protect what is tender and unfolding

You can learn
to be still

Keep your margins open
your mind clear
your evenings free
of dings and rings and blinking screens

A different time exists beyond
the ever-urgent feed 
the endless scroll of doom

Time you protect
space you hold
when you say 
No.
Not now.

We create our own sanctuaries
cities, neighborhoods, churches, temples, mosques
hearths and kitchen tables
where the violence rampant in high places
has no foothold

Now 
is time 
for something holy
something spacious
a deeper magic 

Whatever is happening in the digital ether
has no weight compared to now
This moment
This breath
These relationships
This eternal present

Leave a comment

What are your words or images for 2025? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Until next time, peace to each of you, dear readers. I reach across the distance with hugs and hand squeezes, with the aroma of dirt warming in the spring and apple crisp baking. We are held. We are loved. We have each other.