©January 2025 Janet Maher, Text & Image, All Rights Reserved
On January 23 I posted a draft of the following (edited and expanded here) to my current Instagram account, but it only appeared on the one I used before relocating to Rhode Island. This, and other complications that permeated the month, motivated me to begin writing again on one of my blogs that has lain fallow for quite a long time. Now, before January is fully over, here is a first post for Trusting the Process: Getting There from Here, 2025
This weekend I commented to someone that as we age we need to look with kinder eyes on our faces and bodies. I have found that in this last section of my life so much of my original self, my young spirit, has returned to my awareness like a circle almost ready to complete itself. This January, more different than any in my lifetime, politics have shaken my psyche, along with many others. Keeping up with news of ever-worsening daily world chaos while attempting to simultaneously nurture one’s personal and work/professional life has become everyone’s new reality.
This morning, after so many years of enjoying her beautiful and labor-intensive work in free weekly emailings, I finally activated a token monthly payment for Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. This is also support for my soul. (For those who love the written word I highly recommend her wonderful blog.) Popova quoted Annie Dillard regarding winter’s ability to awaken us to life. It struck me as a reminder to remain focused in this difficult time.
“…There is nothing to be done about [the power of the Universe] but to ignore it or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.”
Maria Popova’s 1/22/25 subscription mailing list, “Midweek Sanity Oasis, Annie Dillard on How Winter Awakens Us to Life”
I generally find great comfort in thinking about the energy of immense Life while trying to do whatever is possible within my own small scale. Since childhood I have believed in a kind of “inner pilot light” that I should never allow to be dampened or put out. (Did my mother or grandfather alert me to it?) It instinctively allowed me to find joy in the small, natural moments. It led me to leave people and situations that threatened my soul’s health throughout the long and winding path to now. It made me an artist. This new year will be more intentionally about embracing that which keeps my pilot light steady and bright. As politics wreak ever more havoc on the world, I hope that those who most need it will be able to reawaken their good-hearted pilot lights, walk fearlessly, keep hold of our visions and take solace in our soul-nurturing chosen tribes.
Trust the process. Work steady. Protect your pilot light.
Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here 
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