I did something slightly different this past year and chose both a word and also a tagline to go with it. Torrent: guard your flow . I did not manage to write about it as I was busy living it, but at year's end I'm sitting back down to see where it took me. This past year has been a ride. I feel like I can safely say that I am a completely different person now than I was a year ago, even more so than usual. There were forks I chose to take as well as wild rapids that I was slurped away on, but I'm at peace with where I've come to. I've completely reenvisioned my spiritual practices and discovered new community and new ways of being. I've taken my approach to home and family and recreated them from the ground up. I've embraced and become public about my own queerness. I feel like, perhaps for the first time since childhood, I am approaching a new year fully myself - and that is a wonderful feeling. To know that my values, my actions, and my habits are all mi...

After somewhat inadvertently choosing a big, strong, broad word last year, I was thinking something "nice" for this year. Flow  came to mind initially, but that didn't seem quite right. Then it expanded into a river, burst through a dam, roared over a waterfall, and led me to  torrent. Torrent   [noun]  a strong and fast-moving stream of water or other liquid; [a] sudden and copious outpouring [of something]  I did pause briefly, since it does tend to be a destructive word, but really I've been dismantling outgrown structures in my life of late and sometimes growth requires demolition first - so I went ahead with it. There aren't a lot of socially positive words to describe being in large amounts of water, but in this case I am the water (in a sense).  So here's to a year of flowing freely, living undammed, and learning new ways to see things (my word invariably holds depths that I can't fathom when it first arrives). I will attempt to update more regular...