Have you seen the waxing full moon the past few nights or mornings? Today, January 13th, is the official Cancer Full Moon, close to the moon phase that greeted me when I was born. It drives me crazy that my phone won’t record the same large image my eye sees, harvest moon huge as it is. While driving across town this morning I was “risking points on my creative license” (thanks to The Fixx for those lyrics) to snap a photo of the moon over the desert, which looked like a moonscape itself.
Long ago during some years of cancer caregiving (which I wrote about in Damocles’ Wife), I began thinking of the crescent moon as a time of coping, the dark of the moon as a good time to crawl back in bed and pay attention to dreams, and the full moon as full of hope and faith. The day after my mom died in 2021, I noticed the half moon in the afternoon, as if she were giving me a wave along with a new metaphorical Mom’s moon to notice each month.
Paying attention to the waxing and waning and waving phases reinforces the paradoxes of light & dark, sunrise & sunset, life & death, giving & receiving, but also that there’s even more complexity worth savoring with gratitude.
Reflecting on 2024 before jumping fully into 2025, I am grateful to have worked with so many wonderful authors on books with Creative Courage Press and also books being written for publishing elsewhere. In 2024, we received a Nautilus Silver Award for Caryl & Jay Casbon’s 2023 book, Side by Side: The Sacred Art of Couples Aging with Wisdom & Love. In June, I published Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss by David Kopacz, MD.
It was a perfect year for releasing a book on that topic, given my own hand surgery in April on my right thumb. I’ll be having my left thumb rebuilt on January 24, 2025. Caring and being cared for is an ongoing theme!
While that may sound more like the ‘ego’ story of 2024, I want to share some of the joyful, mundane ‘soul’ moments, in random order:
Growing zinnias from seed.
Discovering how satisfying a hard-boiled egg is vs. scrambled.
Watching the peaches and pears go from bare branches to blossoms to fruit.
Discovering cat-pheromone juice you plug into a wall outlet to calm two cats, who were struggling to get along.
Being one-handed for 7 weeks, regaining my 9-year old muscle memory for journaling with my left hand.
Getting handwritten encouragement from my surgeon, “You are more stable than you think you are.”
The honor of editing manuscripts by 3 octogenarians (excited to publish those later in 2025-26).
Negotiating sharing one car with Dad, pleasantly surprised it was easier than expected (enjoying many nice mountain drives to escape the heat).
Laughing at roosters crowing at 4 a.m. as if working hard to pull the sun up over Grand Mesa.
Missing the Perseid meteor showers in August due to clouds, then full moon, getting the message we don’t always have to witness miracles to believe in them.
It’s no surprise that I love playing with words. That’s why I especially loved discovering the concept of “verbing” that David incorporated into his book as a tribute to his friend and co-author, Joseph Rael “Beautiful Painted Arrow” who taught him how Indigenous languages, (like his Tiwa language of Picuris Pueblo) place more emphasis on verbs than on nouns. David wrote, “As I have explored this with Joseph, I have come to see that the English language’s emphasis on nouns preferences a sense of separation.” That’s why “verb-ing” has inspired feeling into a sense of “being” more than “doing” for this year and beyond-ing.
Here are some verb-ing blessings I wish for you for fully living in 2025:
playing * enjoying * believing * loving * laughing * hugging * caring * connecting * creating * encouraging * giving * receiving * exploring * supporting * energizing * emerging * releasing * relaxing * resisting * reimagining * reviving * listening * befriending * wondering * walking * feeling * unwinding * celebrating * experimenting * wording * trying * tasting * planting * integrating * shining * persisting * healing
Caring is our human calling—it is where we are most human, most able to help those who are suffering, but in caring we are also most vulnerable. To care is to open our hearts as widely as possible. Caring is a gift that gives to both the giver and the receiver,
making us all better heart-people.
~ David R. Kopacz, MD, from Caring for Self & Others
In the light of the Full Moon, I send New Year wishes to you and your loved ones.
Here are a few other Substacks I’m enjoying and recommending for their inspiration that gives me faith in the coming year as well:
Being Other Wise by Sherry K. Watt (author of The Theory of Being)
from the womb of the world soul
by Veronika Bond
Twaikus: Micropoems of Wonder and Bafflement by Dan Hines
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