Endings and beginnings are essential. Even though one day rolls into the next and they don’t really differ from each other all that much, there’s something about starting a new year that’s like getting out a blank canvas. Still virgin, it begs the possibility of almost anything. We get to create the reality we want.

It’s not like we mourn the outgoing year. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Oh, I’m so sad, I was really attached to 2013. I’m not ready to let it go!”  No, we like the idea of throwing away the past, drinking enough to forget all about it, and waking up the next day to start fresh.

But now we are entering the end of an epoch as well, along with the beginning of a new one. We are hospice workers to what is dying and midwives to what is emerging. And it is we who are birthing this new world, we who are privileged to live in a time when everything is provided: the roads, the stores, the internet, houses, cars, airplanes, computers, cell phones. We live in a time of the greatest privilege humans have ever known.

This privilege gives us enormous capacity to do something.

A good thing, too, because we are simultaneously entering a time of extreme danger, more dire and daunting than anything humans have faced in our long journey to now. This will be the year, I predict, that this realization reaches the general population that climate change, and all the environmental problems that face us are real and serious. There’s nothing like common problems to unite a people.

In my meditation the other day I saw how we are not only giving birth to a new world, we are being born into a new form. That form doesn’t look outwardly any different from our current form, but inwardly it is the first awakenings of our divinity, a new state of grace, shining, sensitive, and awake. Barbara Marx Hubbard called this new form homo universalis, the universal human.

Our awakening is simultaneously inner and outer. The chakra system provides the map to both worlds, opening the portals within ourselves that lie between them. To navigate the journey, we need a good map, a sturdy vehicle (our body) and a conscious driver.

Join me this year in giving birth to a new world of possibility. Take the journey upward for liberation from fixed forms, or downward, for manifestation of your highest aspirations. Journey deeper for sacred contact with the divine within, or outward for social change.

Dream big this year. Ignite the light within and let it shine forth in its full spectrum of possibility. I’ll provide the map—you decide where you want to go. See you on the Rainbow Bridge!

With love and light,

Anodea Judith
12.31.13