How The New Year Feels

The Show Is Over: Let's Go Home

Sometimes I want to say something very simple.

This New Year’s felt particularly urgent, as though we are shedding a dulling snake skin, casting off strangulation.

We want to be set free, from something very hard to pinpoint, some kind of terrible dilution of the spirit, so pronounced these last 5 surreal years.

We have to change.

We have to change—not wait for corrupt, murderous institutions to crumble.

We have to be more loving.

Suspiciousness, armor, division, hostility—it’s reduced us, like armless, earless statues. Many people are speaking openly about wanting to be human again.

This is what I learn from you all: You give me something to aspire to.

Forgiveness is the theme of 2026:

Shed the old skin, drop the old grudges, stop nursing resentments, stop terrorizing one another over differences of perception.

We’ve lost enough.

Love Story

Peter spent New Year’s Eve with his dog Batman sleeping on a mattress in the bathroom, as poor Batman was so nerve-shredded by the fireworks in Eskilstuna.

This little act of love made my New Year’s morphic field light up.

Most people, I imagine, would say: “I can’t move the mattress to the bathroom and sleep in there. He’ll be ok. Dogs are resilient.”

That’s exactly what is genuinely wrong with the world!

That and nothing else.

I wake up each morning heavy with regret for each time I didn’t do all I could have, or a fraction of it, even. Other times I did way way way too much, and nobody noticed.

In that way you can “give” from a void inside yourself you’re trying to fill, and it only expands. It’s not “giving,” anymore, it’s sheer co-dependent lunacy.

How to get it all straightened out, make it a morphic field you can be proud of—that’s what I think about.

In the early morning hours, I think about everybody I love and miss but never reach out to, for no earthly reason whatsoever.

I guess I’m afraid they’ll say: “Good to hear from you.”

In 2026, we’re going to get serious about words and their effects.

In 2026, let’s limit our friends to people who aren’t interested in troubled frequencies.

If guilt, for example, is exchanged, it’s a funeral for a friendship.

Instead: Give from the heart when the energetic field is attuned and conscious. Not from exhausted parts of us, driven by fear of inadequacy, or fear of a rebuke of some kind.

We’re all amputees, since Covid, but it can go the other way now, back to the way we were before, if we make it a devotion.

That’s what I want, in 2026.

I feel the magic show, the circus, is essentially over, the lights are on, and the popcorn buckets and trash are all underfoot. Stern faced men sweep up the garbage with giant brooms—they know better than anybody how vast the con was.

We file out of the arena, blinking in the light, and return to our… lives.

But can real life compete?

Nobody won. Nothing turned out like the movies in our heads.

What was it all about?

Nobody knows!

How preposterous.

I have a new friend: A cardinal who comes to my seed tray on my fire escape, she was there this morning. Muted in color, and with a very charming personality. The birds got blueberries, in addition to their seeds, for New Year’s.

2026 is about these so called little things.

I suddenly remembered a line I like so much in a René Char poem—the last one:

LONG LIVE...

This country is but a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcher.
In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly dressed birds
take the first name of truth.
We only borrow what we can return with interest.
There are leaves, many leaves on the trees in my country.
The branches free not to bear fruit.
Nobody trusts the good faith of a conqueror.
In my country, we say thank you.
A half-hearted greeting is unheard of in my land.*

—René Char

*Some translations say: “A lukewarm greeting is unheard of in my land.”