By Jane Bauer—

“We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”— Chief Seattle

It’s the New Year… again.

Suddenly it is 2026, and at times I feel as though I’m living in a science-fiction film. The kind where a woman goes to sleep and wakes up to find that ten or twenty years have passed. Everyone looks a little older, the world is a little less shiny, yet the headlines remain stubbornly familiar. Immigration crises. War. Corporate takeovers. The looming threat of environmental collapse. Will we ever learn?

As humans, we try to make sense of the world by dividing it into fragments. We divide the vastness of space into time — years, months, days, minutes, seconds. We divide land into countries and cities, drawing imaginary lines that we then defend and fight over. We separate ourselves by identity, ideology, belief. And in all this dividing, we search for meaning: Who are we? What is our purpose? Why does harmony feel so elusive?

There is no shortage of resources on this planet for all of us to live well. And yet, as a species, we continue to make decisions from a frequency of lack. We are taught, explicitly and implicitly, that things are limited, that if someone else has more, there will be inevitably less for us. I believe scarcity is something we have learned, reinforced by systems that benefit from fear and competition rather than trust and cooperation.

This year, according to Chinese astrology, is the Year of the Fire Horse, a cycle that comes around only once every sixty years. Rare, not quite a Halley’s Comet moment, but close. The Fire Horse (Bing-Wu) is associated with vitality, momentum, and spiritual transformation. It represents a powerful alignment of motion and illumination, a time when people feel called to take bold steps, to embark on pilgrimages, and to pursue both outer and inner journeys. So what does this mean for us?

Perhaps it means that speed is no longer the answer. That moving faster, consuming more, and fragmenting the world into ever-smaller pieces has not brought us closer but only further from one another. The Fire Horse does not ask us to escape what feels difficult, but to meet it with courage, clarity, and movement that has direction, not reaction, but intention.

Fire does not simply destroy; it illuminates. Let us step out of patterns rooted in fear and into a different way of being, one where there is enough when we move in alignment rather than competition.

Let us choose presence over paralysis, connection over fragmentation, and curiosity over certainty. To take our own quiet pilgrimages, inward or outward, and to participate more consciously in the systems we belong to. Not to fix the world all at once, but to move differently within it. Sometimes, that is where real change begins.

See you next month,

Jane