Finding our Way Home in 2024

Perhaps you are saying “good riddance” to 2023. Or maybe there were breakthroughs and challenges that you overcame and you are eager for what is possible, even as we stand poised on the brink of 2024.

My little belief is that the soul is always calling each of us back to tend the fires of our fiercest and most deeply buried longings.

One of my favorite teachers is the late John Welwood, a Buddhist Psychologist. He wrote prolifically and magnificently about our work of transformation as human beings. In a final interview, Healing the Core Wound of the Heart, he talks about the Psycho-spiritual quest we are on in this life. As we move through the wilderness of our emotions, healing and transforming childhood and family of origin wounds, there is a deeper wound. In his architecture of how we fully become self realized and whole, the separation from our Ground of our Being is the deepest wound many of us carry around. It is that separation from our Loving Source, God, Yhwh, Allah—however you call the Divine Spirit. The estrangement begins when we are born.

The English poet William Wordsworth names this condition ….

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:.

We are quickly socialized into our families, communities and the culture—beginning the journey of building our ego and false self—a necessary quest to be able to adapt and function in our society.

Welwood names the lifetime “embodied psychospiritual work” as the challenge to turn around and face our soul’s longing and hunger— this wound of leaving the original source of our Divine spark and essence—and find our way home to union. Communion. 

He names the wound as samsara, a Buddhist term for “neurotic suffering, unnecessary suffering, self created suffering.” Somedays I wonder if samsara is a contagion, an epidemic in our society. We are a people of so much affluence, yet so many of our souls are empty, hungry ghosts. We have lost real and authentic connection not only with our communities and loved ones, but also with ourselves, our soul’s deepest meaning and purpose.

So, before I geek out too much on the psychology of this, I’ll offer a Prayer for the Morning—for when you arise on the first day of January 2024. It is written by Audette Fulbright Fulson, who is an amazing prayer bringer and poet.

Did you rise this morning

broken and hung over with weariness and pain

and rage

tattered from waving too long

in a brutal wind?

Get up child.

Pull your bones upright

gather your skin and muscle

into a patch of sun

draw breath deep

into your lungs.

You will need it for

another day calls to you.

I know you ache.

I know you wish the work

were done

and you with everyone

you have ever loved

were on a distant shore

safe, and unafraid.

But remember this,

tired as you are

you are not alone.

Here and here and here also

there are others weeping

and rising

and gathering their courage.

You belong to them

and they to you

and together

we will break through

and bend the arc of justice

all the way down

into our lives.

Here’s to the journey of finding our way back, just a little bit more, to our soul’s home in 2024.

May you know you are beloved in the human family.

May your Divine spark shine.

May you feel cared for,

May you be lifted up even as you care for others

May the teeming community of creation that surrounds us

inspire you with awe!

Blessed be.