As I reflect on the ending of 2025, my mind is pulled back to August 2024 as the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it. My aunt and I were swinging in our hammocks and talking about life’s endings. We talked about the grief of losing loved ones, beloved pets, and change as inevitable. We both had experienced recent loss and shared stories of how our loved ones in the beyond had reached back through the ethers in unexpected ways.

My grief was recent, a soul bestie in fuzzy form, my cat of 18.5 years had passed a month before. I had come through 2.5 years of intense senior care with him, with the final year leaving me emotionally and physically exhausted from round-the-clock care, but so present and tuned into him that his parting was only in the physical. The undeniable and recorded signs immediately followed his passing; even others were stunned by what was coming through. I knew that his passing was a doorway, an opening that would help me expand on my own gifts and sensitivities. What I didn’t realize was just how much I would open in the coming year and a half.

I’ve always been sensitive, I’ve always “known things.” Things I can’t fully comprehend in the moment, but in hindsight, my premonitions fill in with details. These come into my awareness as intense feelings, visuals, a knowing, or even a call to action that instantly moves me to a decision point, igniting my path forward.  

We were celebrating a retirement in the family, the closing of an old era, and the blank canvas of the new. I looked out from my hammock and watched my family playing. My spunky 89-year-old grandma was talking trash while she was playing cornhole with a few other family members. Laughter, whoops, claps, and groans followed each throw and landing of the bean bag onto the board. I continued the scan across the yard, my eyes stopping with each person giving witness to their moment of joy, freedom, and play. It was a beautiful moment, one I wanted to remember. Then, out of nowhere, sadness and grief washed over me, and the message dropped in, “This is the last time we all get together like this.” I paused, wetness welling up in my eyes, throat clenching, and my gut dropping as my eyes fell to my grandma. My mind questioned, “Do we lose her this year?” I’ll save you the guess, we didn’t. The party ended with hugs, promises to get together more often, and gratitude for the time we had together. I smiled through the goodbyes but could not shake the knowing that change was coming.

The intense, recurring dream began sometime in October and recurred many times until December 2024. In my dream, I would be looking out across a landscape. I could see far off into the distance. Every time, I was alone in the dream, and somber. The season felt like Autumn, and in front of me, an expansive meadow of grass stretched out until it met trees in the distance, which stood against a backdrop of hills. The grass was near the end of its cycle; the once-vibrant blades now had wilting tops, and the entire field was listing to the left. The field, the trees, and the hills were blanketed in fog, the kind that permeates everything without completely obfuscating the landscape. I could see through to the trees and the hills beyond, but the fog was undeniable. I felt into the fog, and it felt like death. I looked across the landscape, and the fog was pervasive; there was no place untouched. I knew there was no place to hide from this death. I grieved the ending I could not see but knew was coming.

After each dream, I woke up with heaviness, grief, uncertainty, and concern. The feelings sat deep in my body in all the places I hold fear and uncertainty. It took hours after each dream to shake the feeling. My mind tried to fill in the gaps with the information it had and kept seeing the world in a state of change, specifically the US. I wanted to believe it was a premonition of external change in the world as each person faced their own internal nudges, knowing, decision points, and realignments. While this proved to be an accurate interpretation (as 2025 would later prove in many ways), it was only partially true, as I wanted to believe it was a macro change in the collective, not a micro change in my own life. My mind was not at a place where it could conceive of or digest the magnitude of change that was coming. The asteroid was headed straight toward me, and it was about to obliterate the life I had carefully built. In hindsight, I realized this recurring dream transmission allowed me to pre-grieve what was coming and loosen my grip on my life so I could let it go. This pre-grieving was unseen grace in action.

Change started unfolding for me in 2025, almost immediately. It felt like the tide of my life was ebbing, and I watched with sadness as old structures, friends, family, and people I cared about began to break apart and leave. I recall a moment in February where I watched a piece of my heart go out with the tide. A decision beyond my control had been made, and there was nothing I could do but accept the outcome and grieve the loss that followed. I watched this little piece of my heart floating on the water, being pulled out to sea. I didn’t try to stop it. I recall thinking, “ok, whatever needs to go in my life, can go. I will no longer try to hold the wave to the sand. Let’s get this over with as fast as we can so that at some point in the future, the tide can come back in.” Pro-tip: Be careful what you wish for people…..

The king tide came in April and hit like a Tsunami. I won’t take you through every twist and turn of the journey, but I will say what I had known for a very long time that there would be a point in my life where I would have to give up my life as I knew it. That time had arrived even if I didn’t feel ready.

My recurring visions and dreams changed to a train station, a single track at the end of the line. There was a small concrete platform, maybe 15 feet wide, and on the other side was a tiny rocket ship that seated just one. I stood face to face with my partner and said, “Please come with me.” He looked back at me and said, “he couldn’t come with me. That this next phase was my journey and not his.”  It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t withholding; it was that our journey together had reached the natural point of separation.

We hugged and cried on the platform. I knew as soon as I stepped onto that ship, my life would go quantum. I didn’t know what that truly meant at the time, but the hindsight of 9 months shows me just how true that phrase had become. I watched as my waking life started aligning in ways I could not explain, supporting the release of the relationship and the transition to my next phase. It was like I was being funneled down a raging river through a high-walled canyon with no way out, only through. I was fully supported in ways that surprised me, and my job in that moment was to keep my head above water and not fight the current.

The ending wasn’t easy, but it was love filled and lacked the dramatic explosions commonly associated to a relationship’s end. We loved each other deeply and had a wonderful life together, but we agreed that our paths were diverging and we lovingly released one another to our futures.

Choosing truth over comfort remains one of the most self-loving, life-affirming acts I have ever done. It was also the most terrifying and the most challenging thing I would face in the coming months. The king tide had done its work; this time, the vision was me on a boat going out with the tide, me watching him on the shore watching me going out to sea. There was only a vast sea in front of me, and another blanket of fog on the horizon. This time, the blanket was thick, and I could not see through to the other side.

I have thousands of pages of written words documenting my experiences, my struggles, my insights, and my journey over the past 9 months. Yet I find it difficult to condense and articulate the grief, depth, and beauty that shaped this time of my life. Some glimpses into soul work get to remain mysteries.

I look at the inventory from this past year, and with a sense of awe and gratitude, I look at all that 2025 contained:

• Relationship endings
• New connections and opportunities
• Helped launch an App
• Learned to sail
• Started a blog
• Found my edges
• Faced my deepest fears
• Grieved and honored the life that got me to this point
• Allowed presence and authenticity to become something I embody, rather than govern and control
• Laughed, found presence and peace amid chaos
• Started scripting my next phase of life, “my golden era.”
• Loved myself more deeply than I thought possible
• Released all that would not serve me in this next phase of life
• Loved without reason
• Expressed my creativity through writing and composing music
• Dared to start dreaming of the impossible as potential

All of this while holding down a day job. Damn girl, you have been busy.

It is only now, in the aftermath, that I see how well my life had prepared me for walking this stretch of my journey. I won’t sugarcoat it to say it was easy; it wasn’t. I will say that I was fully supported in both seen and unseen ways at every turn, and I was more prepared than I realized. I sit here on the precipice of a new era, one that is already showing itself in the familiar ways my life has always communicated with me. There is beauty to come, there is alignment, there is joy and love.

There are more things in my life that will move out in the coming year, but I already know what is leaving, and I see the hints and glimpses of what is aligning. I don’t know how this all plays out, but I know I can trust that there will always be the right net to catch me. I used to fear change. I used to resist it and hide from it, and now I see I am letting it sit beside me. I look at it with curiosity, which is new to me. I guess the final bullet point I could add to my list of things accomplished in 2025 is that I learned to trust fall into myself and that love is always there to catch me.

2025, you have been a doozy of a year; if I never see the likes of you again in this lifetime, I will be relieved. With that said, I am grateful I came out of this year knowing myself more deeply than I thought possible. I am delighted that fear is something I observe but no longer let control me to the point of inaction. Yes, I still fear, I’m not trying to overcome it. Sometimes my whole body shakes, but when I stop shaking, I get back up and face the next step.

Most of all, I am awed that I was able to step into my depth, my presence, my being and my authenticity more than I have every allowed myself. Am I finished? No, not by a long shot, but I also don’t have an end goal other than to love deeply and live a simple and beautiful life. I am here with open hands saying yes to what comes next and a knowing that the tide brings with it joy, love, laughter and a life better than I can imagine. I don’t expect perfection in myself or others; that is impossible, and we are delightfully messy beings. Presence over perfection has been my mantra this year; sometimes the deepest truths arrive in shaky hands and trembling voices. The beauty is stepping around the fear and allowing these truths rise and move us forward to what is waiting for us around the bend.

The words for this song were written in February 2025. As I listen to the words and music, I smile at how this song is my unknowing theme song for 2025. I lived through a tremendous amount of change and guess what, I am fine. You will be too if you are on the edge of stepping into a big change, just trust your knowing.

The Changing Sky

https://suno.com/s/85tjFe5gGNMOvpTQ