December New Moon

reflecting on the past year, stepping with courage into a new one

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winter sunset and crescent moon, Espanola, New Mexico, 2020 / photo: Maia Duerr

New Moon / December 19, 2025

Recently a friend from Zuni Pueblo shared with me that this December new moon (which happens to fall very near winter solstice) marks the new year for their community; it’s a time of fasting and quiet reflection, of storytelling. When she said that, I could feel my own yearning for going into that kind of creative silence right about now, to move beyond thoughts and words and to swim in the deep waters of heart and intuition.

This new moon offers us an invitation to reflect on the year we’ve all been through, and to feel into a vision for the one yet to come, to connect with our deepest intentions in this the dark time.

This last new moon message of 2025 comes in a bundle of three:

• a few personal reflections on this past year

• a mini-review of a book that will nourish your spiritual path

• a brilliant manifesto that offers a compass for navigating these turbulent times

1 / Year-end Reflections

In my last full moon message, I shared a Reflection and Intention process with these five questions at the heart of the process:

1. What am I celebrating? What am I grateful for? What has been wonderful and magical about this past year?

2. What is one aspect about myself that I have especially loved this year? What am I proud of?

3. What would I have done differently this year?

4. What do I want to let go of?

5. What do I want to call in for the coming year?

If you’ve had a chance to let those questions work on you and if you’ve had insights from the process, I’d love to hear about it!

As I went through the process myself and looked back at these past 12 months, what stood out is what a remarkably harsh year this has been, not just for me but for all of us. In my small world, so many beloveds were lost: people, dogs, even trees. For all of us, we’ve been witnessing unimaginable terror, cruelty, and trauma unfold in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, U.S. cities invaded by Gestapo ICE troops, and so many other places. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, I don’t have to tell you, you’ve been living through it too. The frequency and level of suffering has been relentless.

Yet when I looked back on all this, I saw that nearly everything I was grateful for was connected to those very places of heartbreak.

As I accompanied my old dog Lucy on her dying journey, I somehow found it in me to rise up and meet the moment, to face fears and anxieties and move beyond them into vulnerability, trust in the unknown, and faith in the power of love. In the process, other people showed up in beautiful ways, miracles unfolded.

When I looked at the atrocities that went down this year in places like Gaza, in the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles and other cities, I also remembered the courage of those who are speaking out loudly against genocide, against the way immigrants are being targeted. They aren’t just using their voices, they are putting their bodies on the line, often putting their own lives at risk. This is a testimony to the remarkable strength of the human spirit.

I haven’t yet done the Intention part of the process, but some of my responses to question #5 are giving me a hint of how I want to step into the new year: with openness, curiosity, and a receptivity to new beginnings.

2 / Holding Nothing: a mini book review

Hold Nothing: An Invitation to Let Go and Come Home to Yourself, by Elena Brower, is a wonderful tool for navigating the inner planes of our being. In this beautiful new book, illustrated with artwork by the author, she paints a detailed picture of what it feels like to live from intention, and the qualities that are nurtured with a consistent contemplative practice.

Elena is an artist, mother, longtime yoga teacher, and more recently a Zen practitioner. Our paths crossed at Upaya Zen Center where she has been studying chaplaincy with Roshi Joan Halifax and faculty, and I am grateful for an embodied familiarity with her clear presence and warm smile.

In her writing, Elena has a gift for making practice entirely accessible and for conveying the ineffable benefits that come with it. Take this passage, about listening:

Creating a field of generous attention and care takes practice. As we make our initial attempts at listening with precision and gentleness, we are changed slowly and quietly from within. You might notice you’re walking in the world with fewer words and more creativity as you grow older. You might experience a level of kindness toward yourself that feels like a release of linear thinking into a more spacious sense of inner freedom, which is precisely the offering you’ll make to those in your life with whom you’ve not been listening attentively.

Elena shares personal stories that illustrate these elements of practice, grounding the whole book in a down-to-earth and at times humorous way. These personal accounts are interspersed with practice and writing prompts, encouraging us to go deeper in our inquiry.

There are 45 practices throughout the book, many of them in the form of heart- and mind-opening questions, that invite the reader into explorations of qualities such as opening to tenderness, seeing with compassion, and listening before speaking.

Holding Nothing is the kind of book that invites you into deep reflection, if that is a place you wish to go. When I was involved in Upaya’s Chaplaincy Training (as its director as well as a student), one of my favorite descriptions of a chaplain was someone who comes alongside another and supports them to find the spiritual anchor that makes it possible to navigate challenging life situations. With Holding Nothing, Elena offers the reader an opportunity to become their own chaplain. As she writes:

This book is an invitation to come alongside yourself, to experience new ways to approach your own heart, to listen well, and to love yourself with rigor, certainty, warmth, and tenderness. To live deeply and reverently in the smallest details.

This book would make an excellent gift for someone you love, and that someone might be you!

3 / Breaking the Apocalyptic Fever

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Of all the things I’ve read this year in search of guidance to get through this mess we’re in, the one that has stayed with me the most is an article titled “The Rise of End Times Fascism” by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, published in April 2025.

It’s quite long and much of the first part of the piece is brutal to take in. But Klein and Taylor’s analysis of how we got to this point and where we’re at now is spot-on. Here’s the very short version:

End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

You may not want to dive into the whole article, though I encourage you to. But I want to highlight this section near the end that offers a blueprint for coming out of this apocalyptic nose dive and finding our way toward the “another world” we know is possible, thanks to Arundhati Roy. Here’s an excerpt:

How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

Storytelling is one of the most potent tools we have to bring this world into being. We cannot and we must not let stories of doom and dread take root in our hearts, in our children’s hearts, in those we love. I think back to my friend from Zuni Pueblo’s description of this winter solstice time on the Pueblo, a time of fasting and storytelling. This is a time to allow the story of interdependence and belonging to be planted at the very core of our soul, and for those seeds to be nurtured by our love this winter.

With that, I am headed out on a winter break to rest and renew my own body/mind/soul, and I wish you a peaceful solstice and holiday season.

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Other Places to Find My Writing

• I’ve got another Substack: Postcards from New Mexico.

• Dharma Compass is the name of my monthly column on the Buddhist Global Door website. My most recent article: Toward a Socially Responsible Mindfulness

• I’ve got a book! Work That Matters is a mindfulness-based guide for people who are seeking right livelihood. Please check it out and tell others about it.