2024 Word of the Year - Heart

I am worthy of the time it takes to do the things that heal my heart.

“All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.”
― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Here’s what’s on repeat around here:

I have been picking a word to guide my year for the last few years, and I can still remember each of them and what they brought to my life. Sometimes I repeat them in sequence - embrace, listen, linger, connect, open, ease - like a litany, like a prayer, like a memory, like a song whose rhythm all of the women I was before remember the dance steps to.

Some years, my word knocks at all of the doors and demands entrance for weeks well before the time I was ready for it, clamoring louder and louder until I stop ignoring it and finally pay attention to what it is trying to tell me. Some years, I wake up with the knowledge heavy in my chest that the word I’ve been seeking for has finally found me and we have a brief and joy filled moment of communion as we meet. One year, one special treasure of a year, a trusted companion shared it with me and it felt like she had plucked a star right from the sky, cradled it in her open hands and offered me the rarest of gifts, the gift of being seen, cared for, and carried from one season to the next.

This year - oh, this year, this year that was just a string of discomfort, pain, and tragedy held together by a cord of resilience and sheer determination, this year where we lost so much and had to dig deep to carve out space for joy on the darkest nights, this year where all of the things I had hoped to set down dug into my spine like weights holding me in place when all I wanted was to move past the grief and trauma that seemed to crop up over and over and the things I had hoped to carry slipped right out of my fingers - everything was different. This year, my word didn’t do any of those things and a week passed and I had despaired that we would ever meet and then one day, there it was, right on time.

December arrived quiet and soft with very little of the fanfare it normally does in our neck of the woods and I found myself completely lacking all of the quintessential holiday spirit that is normally a dear companion. We did not put up a Christmas tree, we opted to forgo buying each other presents and I may have only listened to a dozen carols over the month. (I did have my cake and my sorrel - my mother knows just what I need even before I ask for it.) I just did not have the bandwidth to muster up the energy it would take to manifest the cheer of the season and rather than fake it and force it, I decided to just let it be.

Making this choice and living with it seemed like the only approach we had available to us in the season that we were in, and while it was incredibly difficult at times and I had a few low days, I continued to choose to be where we were, feel what we were feeling and allow space for it, even if it meant that the things I normally spend weeks looking forward to were absent. I allowed myself to live in that December like it was any other month, going about our day to day life, and did my best to keep the fomo caged and quiet when it popped up (for the most part, it was thankfully absent. It was as if my naughty brain understood I was already feeling pretty low and opted not to torture me further, which the rest of me really appreciated).

This general malaise coupled with a sudden and severe bout of GI distress really laid me low as 2023 collapsed into 2024 and I had no idea what I wanted, if I even had the courage to want, and had little desire to find a word for this next season - how was I to welcome in a new friend when I wasn’t quite ready for this new chapter to begin and lacked the space and room I wanted to say goodbye to what was behind us? I had every intention to pull an oracle card for the Omen Days, to keep an eye out for what the universe would tell me, to journal in my fancy new notebook with my fancy new pens, to be open and ready and then it all fell apart around me and it seemed that this word, this sigh and prayer for direction and purpose had even less motivation on show up to take root.

And then there it was, bright and early thisTuesday morning and it was like it had been there the entire time and how could I ever have felt unmoored looking into what was ahead when it was always there beside (inside) me?

Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

HEART.

After 33 years with this rebellious and relentless organ beating in my chest, it feels like I don’t know my own heart anymore. I have lost touch with her, forgotten how to to hear her whisper through the layers of sinew and bone, and missed opportunities to protect her, and in doing so, have felt parts of me drifting out to sea, becoming slowly unrecognizable. I like to think that I am the type of person who knows how to follow her heart - my brave, riotous, loyal, reckless heart that has both inspired me to remove the mask and kept me up at night racing with fear over the same removal - but it has started to feel like it has led me to the edge of a cliff and left me perched at a precipice, inches from free fall into nothingness and newness and choking, cloying fear and I no longer know how to feel about any of it.

So here we are, my heart and I, with a lot of work to do this year. Work of healing, work of restoration and reparation, work of dreaming and courage, work of hope (always the extravagant variety), and work of love. After seasons of looking outward for validation and reassurance, of chasing high fives and acclaim, after this season of ease where I did not create enough space for it and it ended up carving out room that I was neither prepared nor willing to give (life can be so ironic), I choose to look inward, to the heart of the matter, to point the mirror at myself, at my heart with awe and hope, and look and to wonder and to explore and to learn.

After spending some time with the “ins and outs” list I wrote as a way of framing my intentions for 2024, heart seems like a natural companion for the adventure this year will be (hopefully an adventure of the quiet type but we cannot choose our story, just how we respond), and with this new word, this lens, this guide, I am choosing to embark on this journey eyes open and soul ready for what we will learn and do together. I imagine it will stretch me and challenge me (isn’t that the way of things that the internal work we do is always that much harder than anything collaborative and external) but my heart is gentle and it is my own, and I cannot imagine it will lead me to a place I am unprepared for and leave me to swim in waters I cannot find my footing in.

Cheers to reforging this relationship and to forging new ones, to falling in love with abandon, to following that voice, to repairing the breach, and to living this life extravagantly, openly, and joyously. Cheers to the little webs and ties that bind us together heart to heart, and to the person I will be on the other side of this adventure. Let’s get to work.

• Apparently T-Pain has been hiding a VOICE under all that auto-tune. Wow.

• A poem that sparks joy by ee cummings.

• I watch the Broadway Carpool Karaoke at least once a week.

• This is a quick and fascinating read about carnivorous plants.

• On slowing down in January from Creative Fuel with Anna Brones.

Do you choose a word for the year? Did it come in roaring like a lion or quiet and sweet like a brush of butterfly wings? How are you choosing to set intentions, if any at all, for this year ahead? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Yours in starlight and joy,

Tazhi

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Tangles and Starlight is a weekly-ish newsletter where I leave my heart on the page in the hopes that you will pick it up and meet me with your own. Please feel free to share the bits of it that resonate and use that magic to fuel your own awe filled explorations. It is a joy to be human alongside with you - thank you for reading and for being here. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and sticking around.