Embracing Reflection: A Year End Journey with Livable Futures
Practices for cultivating intention in the charged days between Solstice and New Year
Dear Livable Futures Community,
Sending you all warm wishes as we finish up the calendar year of 2023, and the days begin to slowly lengthen, increasing the light in our lives incrementally but steadily.
My family and I celebrated the solstice and Hanukkah this year and when Christmas came, we thoroughly enjoyed the super quiet, commerce-free days it provided. The hush of closed shops, dark workplaces, and thousands of people at home is always a special treat. We played games, ate good food, and when cabin fever started, took long walks in the local conservation area. What an extraordinary gift these patches of wildness are in cities around the world, a gift previous inhabitants have given to us today. These green spaces reverberate with the mantra that set me on the path to creating Livable Futures and continues to echo in my chest today:
“How can I be a better ancestor?”
“How can I be a better ancestor?”
“How can I be a better ancestor?”
Big love also to those celebrating Kwanzaa right now, today’s principle of Ujima, or collective work and responsibility, is the perfect invocation for this post.
Celebrating Moments of Quiet Reflection
Holding in my awareness the painful inequity of living in peace when others are at war, I am setting geopolitics aside today in favor of quieter, hyperlocal concerns of breath and body, mind and heart. In the quiet of a rainy winter day, with a view of a giant pine tree ringed in fog, I’m savoring the year that has passed while preparing for the year to come.
Year-End Reflection Ritual
Intention is at the heart of much of our work in this community, and intention requires reflection. I’ve never been a great scrapbooker or managed to make those nice family photo albums summarizing key events—kudos to those of you who do—but we do have a happy tradition of reflection and gathering memories in our family that I’m excited to share with you.
Every year between Solstice and New Year's Eve, my family and I take time to think back on the year and name any accomplishments, big or small, we want to acknowledge. We savor, key moments and vivid memories, list things we are grateful for, and the note milestones of our lives together. We usually have 10-20 things that come easily. Then we take time to listen for the smaller, quieter things that need time to surface. We let the list be a big mix of all our various memories and accomplishments in no particular order.
Our list this year includes this lovely hodgepodge:
Conquering the cat’s flea outbreak…Making the Dean’s List again…The new oak tree in our front yard…Shabbat dinners at home..The time we played Bohnanza all day…Finding a perfect Irish breakfast tea…Teaching the Livable Futures course and the amazing students…
We savor them all and say a prayer of gratitude for the gifts and learning of the past year. Sometimes we add wishes or goals for the year to come and discuss intentions for the year ahead. Choosing a word for the year is a relatively new favorite practice we have added. Finally, we have fun reading the lists from past years and are amazed by how much we have forgotten and how fun it is to have these little breadcrumb trails to trigger our memories.
A Practice for Everyone: Try This at Home!
Here’s a quick summary if you’d like to try this practice with your loved ones:
Reflect back on the year and name any major events or highlights that come to mind quickly.
Repeat this reflection, this time going month to month starting with January.
Name the best things of the year and the things you are grateful for but also include challenges you faced and significant milestones.
When it has all come out, take a little more time to notice if anything else wants to be present.
Record these reflections on paper as they come. We use a journal that we add to each year, but you might like a digital trace of these memories or an audio/visual recording. Play with what works for you. Be inclusive and permissive, big or small, it all matters; just notice what you notice and let it all tumble out.
Add goals and wishes for the new year. Sometimes it is fun to categorize these so you can think about different aspects of your life such as:
Health, Wealth, Relationships, Work, Play/Hobbies, Spiritual, Ecological
You can even take a moment to reflect on how you feel about each area of your life and give it a rating. This helps identify priorities for change. Allow for open intentions such as, "I’d like to be more kind," and specific goals, "I want to run a marathon." And often they overlap. For example, I’d like to spend less money on food and waste less food (both a money goal and an ecological one). Mostly just have fun with it.
Read aloud the highlights and memories from the previous year and enjoy remembering all the things you have forgotten and noticing your progress toward goals or areas to which you’d like to re-commit. More on re-commiting in this earlier post.
A Gratitude-filled Year-End List: Livable Futures in 2023
In addition to our personal reflections, I took some time today to do the same practice for the Livable Futures project. My list of memories and accomplishments for 2023 for us includes:
Starting the Substack Newsletter to build community and have a place to regularly share ideas and insights gained.
Reaching our first 100 subscribers to the Newsletter! Thank you for reading!
Seeing massive growth in Podcast for the first season of Livable Futures, especially Emalani Case’s episode on Indigenous Futures and our episode on Foraging Futures. Thank you for listening!
Moving the Podcast over to Substack for easier access!
Hosting a Livable Futures pop-up event at The Joyce Theater and NYU Steinhardt with Cornelius Carter and Heather McCartney!
So grateful for the extraordinary community that came together to focus on social justice and humane technology in dance making and teaching.
Look for more about these discussions here in 2024!
Sharing the Climate Banshee in Ireland and again on social media for the annual installation alongside COP28 UN Climate Talks (this is our third year, the first one was commissioned and hosted by the Wexner Center for the Arts).
Amplifying feminist performance and technology on Instagram.
Reading Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec and Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, and re-reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble.
Teaching two semesters of a new Livable Futures course with an amazing group of students from geography, dance, creative writing, visual art, and design and completing the first Volume of our Livable Futures eBook/Zine!
Wow, what a list! It feels so good to reflect on all these beautiful activities and the people involved. Big gratitude flowing!
Looking Ahead to 2024: A Roadmap for Growth
There is so much I want to share with you all as this calendar year comes to a close.
Exciting New Resources and Offerings
We have exciting new resources on art as social change, hope in dark times, and an incredible collection of “sustaining practices” from contributors. Many student fellows will be offering visual and written essays, prepare to be inspired! A new online course is emerging on humane technology, and we have an indigenous guest artist working with us this year, sharing his work in Andean creative practices for livability. More on that soon!
Podcast's Second Season Underway
The second season of the podcast is underway with editing in progress on a love-filled conversation with Brotherhood Dance Co. about their new project Black on Earth and several others. We can’t wait to share this with you all!
New Sections in the Newsletter and Diverse Topics
Watch for new sections of the newsletter so you can choose what you'd like to read on the different threads of the project from humane technology, to ecological justice, to health and wellness, resources for teaching and mentoring, climate change and more.
We’re excited to share ideas about preparedness and just transitions in changing climates, creative tactics for thriving, self-care and spiritual growth, healthy habits for a healthy planet, and we’re preparing several posts focusing on core practices from the first 8 years of the project.
Spotlight on Artworks
I'm excited to start regularly writing content about artworks and how they help support livability now and help us imagine livable futures. Your input is always a valuable guide so please comment or reach out to me if you have requests!
Performance Rituals and Virtual Reality Experiences
Finally, we have two performance rituals circulating—Climate Banshee and Oasis—and we are creating a new Livable Futures performative lecture and workshop this year while also developing some beautiful Virtual Reality experiences. I can't wait to evolve it all in community with you!
Engaging the Livable Futures Community: Your Requests
Your input matters. What do you envision when you think of Livable Futures? What topics ignite your curiosity, or what challenges do you face? Your requests are not just welcomed; they are integral to shaping the future of this space.
I can’t wait to hear from you.
Love,
Norah
P.S. We’ve reached 100! Thank you for subscribing!
I’m thrilled to share that we have reached our first 100 founding subscribers in this powerful intentional community! If you like what we’re doing, please identify a few people with whom you’d like to share Livable Futures and forward this on to them today.
They can subscribe by visiting the website or using the button below.