It’s been a long time between updates, but here we are just about at the end of 2025, so it’s time for a check in.
My goals for 2025:
1. Solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter festivals.
The main reason I wanted to observe the festivals this year was to develop more of a sense of the natural rhythm of the seasons. Overall I think I’ve had some success. While I haven’t necessarily done a lot to mark the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter festivals, I think I have become more alert to the changes in the natural world around me. That feels important to me, a kind of intentional anchor to time passing rather than days and weeks and months slipping by without notice.
Yule this year was a bit upside down ( almost literally) because we were about to jet off to the northern hemisphere, so it was hard to focus on anything much aside from last minute travel preparations.
At Imbolc, I was in Roma and partway through my final 8-week nursing placement which limited my opportunities, but I gathered some reeds with the intention of weaving them into a small decoration I could hang in my student accommodation. (I did not manage to weave them). Mostly I made a point of spending some time outdoors, taking in the springtime changes in the native flora around me. Looking at the brightening sky, smelling the trees and grasses and watching birds on the water. So that was something.
While I didn’t do anything concrete to mark the equinox/Ostara, I did find myself paying attention to the growing light and earlier dawns. I have a sense now not just of when the light changes, but the lag between light and seasonal temperature changes – which, not at all coincidentally, is more or less the interval between the solstices/equinoxes and the cross-quarter festivals.
I prepared for Beltane by gathering some rosemary from my front garden and drying it over a couple of weeks. On Beltane, I lit the bundle and cleansed my house with rosemary smoke. By end of October I had finished all my uni work and was in a state of stasis waiting for results, so I thought it was time to rededicate my energies to what comes next. It also gave me an opportunity to think about what these kinds of rituals mean to me. Wafting the rosemary smoke through my house gave me a focus to think about what I needed to do to move forward, and watching the smoke dance reminded me that even in still spaces, there is movement.
The next festival on the calendar is Litha, just before Christmas. As it turns out we are gathering with friends that day for a Christmas celebration, which seems like an excellent way to also celebrate the height of summer and give thanks for abundance, especially the abundance that is friends, family, and love.
I think I would like to build on these practices next year. I don’t think the practical aspects need to be particularly significant, but I think it’s good for me psychologically.
Related: I miss having a faith community and I miss the comfort of ritual, but it’s hard to find somewhere I feel like I can participate fully and like I belong. So this year I’ve explored a little bit to see if there’s a way I can meet that need.
I did a Jesuit mini-retreat in June, ‘two hours of quiet’, which I enjoyed. I like Jesuits, and it is a practice and group of people I would have felt completely at home with maybe 20 years ago. It felt calm and familiar this year and I’m glad I went, but even so I felt a bit of an outsider with the group I did the mini-retreat with. Not because they were anything other than welcoming, just because I’m no longer practising and I don’t have a parish. I suppose there are other ways I feel like I don’t fit too. But the mini-retreat was good and I might do more next year.
I participated in the Stations of the Cross at my local Catholic Church on Good Friday. Admittedly Good Friday is maybe not the best time to ease in after many years away, but I felt like observing it some way. The service was familiar but the parish was not for me at all. I’m not sorry I went, but I knew right away it wasn’t a good fit.
I did attend a service at my local Anglican church this year, and it felt like somewhere that I could belong, maybe. The parish is named St Catherine’s, which seemed apt. They are welcoming and accepting, and the Reverend is a woman which I feel pretty good about. I wrestled with the notion of conversion initially until I realised they don’t think I need to, I’m already a full member if I want to be, without changing anything. I might attend again next year and see how it feels.
2. Pee more/eat more beans
Mixed success. Overall I’ve been very good about peeing every time I have a tea break at work, except for the past couple of months. It is probably no coincidence that I have also experienced a couple of UTIs recently too. So I am rededicating myself to the mantra ‘pee more’, and putting it on my list of resolutions for 2026.
The eat more beans one has been a bit more nuanced. I have been eating more legumes this year, so overall that gets a tick.
In September, I began taking a GLP-1 medication. It has been a very interesting process. I have been losing weight steadily which is why I have been using the medication. Not drastic, but steady. I have noticed other changes though:
- I have an ‘off’ switch now – for food, and for alcohol. I get full more quickly, I don’t really eat unless I’m hungry, and a couple of drinks and I generally don’t want any more. In fact, the idea of more feels very gross.
- My tastes have changed. I no longer enjoy fatty foods the way I always have. I don’t dislike them, but I don’t crave them and if I have more than a small amount I feel quite off. I am no longer obsessed with chicken nuggets. Rich foods also don’t hit the spot they way they did previously, I just think ‘well that tastes nice, but it is a bit greasy.’ I have always felt like a meal isn’t adequate without fats and proteins, but some vegetables and rice now often feels like more than enough (I do still need to make sure I’m eating protein though). And I could basically live on fruit now if you let me.
- Lately, I don’t like coffee so much either. I am wrestling with this because a) who can live without caffeine? and b) coffee is part of my personality. Who, actually, am I?
I always knew, intellectually, that human appetite is very hormone-driven, it’s not simply a matter of choice or self-discipline. But it’s absolutely fascinating to discover what that’s like for myself.
3. Chamber orchestra/ballet
My tally so far: one Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra concert, and two Queensland Medical Orchestra concerts. So that hits and exceeds my target of two concerts this year!
I also ended up playing with a highschool string ensemble while I was out in Roma on student placement, and I did a little concert with them too. That was so much fun, and it felt so good to be able to give a little something back to the town that nurtured my musical talent as a kid.
I haven’t managed ballet at all this year, and gym has also fallen by the wayside. I will put these back on the list for 2026. One thing I would like to do is check out Queensland Ballet’s adult classes. I loved classes with 2Ballerinas but part of the issue is that geographically those classes are just so far from home. Queensland Ballet isn’t close either, but it’s closer. We will see.
4. Booze: 75 days for drinking
So this goal fell off the rails, which is okay. There were many beers in the US in June/July which I’m not sorry about, and I never really picked things up again. That said, my drinking habits have changed a lot over the past three months while on GLP-1 medication. It’s a lot easier to choose to limit your alcohol intake if you don’t actually particularly care about drinking alcohol. So for the moment I’m okay with where this goal ended up, and I think I’m just going to see how things go.
It does make planning for Christmas a bit different. Usually we get in heaps of bubbly ahead of time. This year I don’t think we’ll need quite as much, and I’m thinking about also getting in some special low- or no-alcohol options as well.
5. Reduce choices
I got a bit distracted from this goal. Over the next few weeks I will do a bit of a stocktake of where my energies are going and how I can streamline my mental load a bit more.
6. Graduate!
I DID IT. WITH DISTINCTION.