New Year's thoughts.

What is up ahead in 2023? Which pitfalls, snares and traps will pop out of the long grass to trip me up: there is never a time when obstructions, mines, floods and tempests don't occupy the same pathway of freedom from fear, want and guilt?

***

January is here; a storm is blowing outside bringing wet weather, and I've reopened A Course in Miracles after having 2022 away from its 'easy' lessons...

In May it will be the 10th anniversary of my discovery that there was another way. Apart from ACIM, the Camino became the main focus of my life - keeping me alive, as it has, these last ten years.

In a blink of an eye I've turned 50!

The midlife crisis that appeared in my life at the beginning of 2013, with its existential grist, has worn into my surfaces physical and mental, for fully 10 years, so that I feel I have become an entirely separate individual from the one in the past...

Not everyone would probably agree, but I do feel absolutely different to the person who felt abandoned in this 'reality', collapsing marooned into a helpless barren wasteland, with a jagged stoney surface, brittle to feel - like some of the migraine dreams, and sensory distortions therein, I had prior to adolescence - in an overwhelming desert of no hope.

The World still feels painful, disturbing and impenetrably complex, as I sit here surrounded by the fabric of modernity, but these thoughts don't mean anything? They are like the things I see and hear around me because I have given them 'meaning' which is quite apart from what they really are; in themselves?