Midweek Enchantments #5: Any moment can be a portal if you want it to be

New Years Resolutions, Improvisation, Portals, & Winter Revelry

Midweek Enchantments is a weekly(ish) series/practice where I’ll share some writing about enchantment and one-several things I’m feeling enchanted by, with invitations for joining me in this practice.

Heart Music 1946, 1948-49 (oil on canvas) by Agnes Pelton

Dear Shapeshifters,

Unpopular (because it’s too popular) opinion…I feel enchanted by New Year’s resolutions, in the sense of I love the invitation to reflect, to dream, and allow ourselves to shape-shift in the heart of winter.

I absolutely feel the deep exhaustion, the “don’t-ask-me-to-set-goals-in-the-dead-of-winter-or-the-depths-of-despair” energy. I also feel uninspired (and still tempted) by the kind of goal setting we are conditioned into: hyper-productive, linear, individual oriented “self improvement” lists of ways we are somehow going to get all our shit together this year.

Amidst our conditioning into these kinds of resolutions, I want more than their resolute rejection.

I want to ride New Year energy into something else: a wilder kind of reflection, dreaming, and naming of desires that is curious, self attuned, collectively attuned, relationally oriented, playful, less sure of itself, and open to possibility.

Any moment can be a portal if we want it to be, including the coldest, darkest moments of the year.

Winter is a portal.

Rest is a portal.

Slowing down is a portal.

Our grief itself is a portal.

Instead of throwing out resolution making altogether, we can invite ourselves to play in it and do something else with it.

Our goals don’t have to be about doing More.

We can make new years dissolutions: we can rest, loosen, reflect, let rot what needs to rot, surrender what needs surrendering, unravel what’s being unraveled, and embrace a practice of what

Asia Suler

calls “surrendering to the irresistible pulls” of our lives.

Instead of making lists of all the ways we can improve or ramping ourselves up when we’re exhausted, we can turn our attention towards our inspirations and desires, and nourish them in restful ways that allow us to reconnect with what matters most to us.

We can ask ourselves what we really want.

On this theme,

Danica Boyce

shares:

“The weeks following the solstice are indeed a natural time of renewal, though we can sometimes get ahead of ourselves by taking on a laundry list of high expectations in the middle of the lowest energy period of the year. What if instead of giving ourselves a list of more hard things to do right now, we start by gently touching back in with what makes us want to do anything in the first place?”

Improvising, Holding Ourselves Loosely, & Finding Portals Everywhere

Like my delight at playing with resolutions, I’m enchanted by the ways we can surprise ourselves with joy in unexpected places. I’m enchanted by those times when we find ways beyond a complete rejection of the world around us by making room for our joy within it.

Like Reggie Watts doing this unscripted and brilliantly illegible Ted Talk that doesn’t look much like any Ted Talk I’ve ever seen (Thanks Fox for sharing this one):

We have more options than purely rejecting the box’s we find ourselves in.

As Bayo Akomolafe shares:

“don’t come out of the box; decorate its walls. Touch the box. Embroider its corners. Pour libations on its floors. Press your ears against its textured surfaces. In your awkward alliance, you will learn that enchantment is not in short supply, even in the places that feel most bereft of it. And you yourself will not be left intact...

decolonization is not about moving from ‘Here’ to ‘There’, as it is a weirding of the distance between the two.”

Perhaps this “weirding of the distance between” places is not unlike the idea of a portal, or like imagining they could be anywhere, even in a Ted Talk.

I think the world itself invites us to improvise, to hold ourselves a little more loosely while we stay with the trouble of attuning to ourselves and this world’s realities.

I like reimagining resolutions from this place. Interestingly, while resolution means “a firm decision to do or not to do something” (Oxford) the word comes from the Latin resolvere which means "to loosen, loose, unyoke, undo…” and “relax; set free” (Etymology Online).

How might holding ourselves a little more loosely make more space for us and the magic of this world?

One of the many portals found in the Live Oaks and Spanish Moss in New Orleans. Sending so much love and gratitude to this city that holds so much grief and magic.

1 Enchanting Thing about the Gregorian New Year: the Church’s failure to stop Winter Revelry ✨

Of the mainstream traditions of revelry at the New Year, I do want to celebrate the Church’s failure to appropriate and or prevent the revelry of this day, in their attempts to change the understanding of time from being a cyclical one to a linear one, “beginning with the Creation and marching irreversibly toward the Last Judgment” (Filotas, 154).

Bernadette Filotas, in Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Cultures, shares:

“The New Year was the main focus of the Church’s efforts to Christianize seasonal celebrations. Here [it] failed utterly. Not surprisingly, the feast of the Circumcision failed to capture the popular imagination. Despite earnest attempts to persuade the faithful to observe it with prayer, fasting, and penitence, the very pagan celebrations of the Calends of January continued to be practiced and even to evolve throughout the entire early Middle Ages... magical rituals were reinterpreted in temrs of local culture and became more and more elaborate throughout the period. Mumming, sexual license, scandalous dances, songs, and jokes, bouts of drunkenness and gluttony, giving gifts and refusing to give alms, taking auguries [practicing divination], were all intended, ‘according to pagan custom,’ to guarantee a prosperous New Year, or at the least, to gain a foreknowledge of what was to come.” (156)

This carnivalesque thread this time of year persists and is also evident elsewhere. For example, the 12th night is also the mark of the start of Carnival season, which goes until Mardi Gras. And during the medieval Feast of Fools, held on January 1st, hierarchies would temporarily be undone, roles of clergies reversed, a false Bishop or Pope called “the lord of misrule” would be elected, and the church’s rituals would be parodied (Barbier).

This mirrors the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, which Solstice, and New Year celebrations are thought to have their roots in. Saturnalia honored the god Saturn, who represented, among many things, the passage of time, periodic dissolution, renewal, and liberation, and was often depicted carrying a scythe or a sickle, not unlike the Greek Cronos, or our modern Grim Reaper. Saturnalia, which lasted from roughly the December 17th- 23rd, was a carnival atmosphere as well, which also included gift giving, and electing a “King of Saturnalia” who presided over the festival, giving orders to partiers.

Feldman shares: “The carnivalesque creates a space and time in which the norms of society are suspended.”

The carnivalesque invites us to otherworlds, to play as we dream, to hold ourselves a little less tightly, to play with the concept of “new year, new me” to reflect on how we really want to live inside these ruins.

Possibility dwells in the silly and strange and the new shapes we will learn to make together. How can we allow ourselves to become soil for worlds we previously couldn’t imagine?

Art by Sarah Shakeel

Some Resolution/Dissolution inspired questions for the Heart of Winter:

• What beliefs about ourselves and the world are you composting this year? What are somethings you’ve felt resolute about/some unhelpful certainties that you’d like to loosen your grasp on?

• How can you make more room for the strange and the curious this year? What questions do you want to live inside and explore? What do you dream of creating, but haven’t allowed yourself to?

• “What does it feel like to understand how to support yourself when you’re on the edge of the known? What do you need to support yourself when you are on that edge? How could we congratulate and celebrate that we even got to that edge of knowing? ” (

  Xenia Marie Ross Viray
  )

• “What would my resolution look like if it were in celebration of my porosity, the incomprehensible, the lost, the impossible, the preposterous?” (this is from Bayo Akomolafe’s irreverent list of queer resolutions)

With love,

Mara June

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If there’s one enchanting thing right now in your day or week, what is it? Or, what’s a resolution/disolution you might be playing in? Tell us in the comments below🦋✨

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