For all those bringing in the new year from hospital, from suffering, from your own private hell, take care. I know how lonely pain can make us feel. You are not the only ones struggling. I know it’s precious to clear a little time in the year to celebrate and it hurts when life swamps us. There’s a bitterness there brewed more strongly by the brightness of the stars around us, by the beautiful dreams in pieces at our feet. People aren’t supposed to die at Christmas. No one should spend New Year’s Eve bleeding on the floor.

For all the freaks and misfits out there… we are people too. For everyone who feels alone, alienated, lost, the world can be a cold place. A crowded place, but you are not the only naked one in a sea of faceless people. Despair comes to us all sometime. No life is untouched by tragedy. Stay with us.

For everyone who’s life is ending, who is watching it all burn down around them and wondering who they will be tomorrow, hold on. Life is powerfully strange. It takes unexpected directions, unpredictable turns. At the end of everything, a new chapter starts.

To myself, many new years ago, crying silently on the bed with loneliness. You are brave. You will find friends. It won’t always hurt like this.

Goodbye to the old year, to the dreams that ripened, and those that fell to storm or frost. Goodbye to the losses and hurt, to the joy and beauty.

Hello to the unknown. I wish for you that whatever it going on in your world, you find a moment to feel alive. To feel naked, stripped of name and role and obligation to the world. That the stars or the earth or the trees or wind or rain would call out to you and nourish you. Feed you on strangeness and mystery. Life is so much bigger than we make it. Everything speaks with a language and we understand only a few of them. Remind us of our smallness in the world, of our need of it and connection to it. To feel the spaces between the places we are known, the stories we are familiar with. Here, we breathe a different kind of air. We are a different kind of creature.

Run from violence and doom. Risk love. Hold hope. Be true to your many hearts, the broken and the whole. Burn that which must pass and plant that which must grow. Grieve and yearn under the same skies. It is hard to be human at times. Don’t make it harder. Be.