on beginning when the world is ending

// initiation //

“When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

[…]

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.”

—John O’Donohue, Irish philosopher and poet

Thank you to Maria Popova for sharing this quote on a recent article about beginnings.

It’s the second week of January, and I’m thinking about beginnings. Maybe it’s because the old world is ending every day, in a thousand different ways, and it feels like we’re on fire at the threshold. State violence is rapidly increasing. Public executions, violent detentions, disappearances. Lies and more lies from our government officials. In this landscape, the idea of “beginnings” feels almost obscene… and yet I can’t stop wondering what kinds of worlds are struggling to be born beneath the wreckage.

When you’re swimming in grief, you live in the past, in memory. You live with absence, voids, a future that could have been. It takes painful effort to turn the page, to initiate movement. Much easier to linger and wallow and twist wistfully back to nostalgia. Or to freeze entirely, numbed by the scale of what is happening around us, by the cruelty that keeps repeating itself.

My word for last year was now. Now kept me anchored in the aftermath of my father’s sudden death. Now kept me awake. Now kept me breathing deeply. Now was not necessarily a call for beginnings, but it did call me back to myself. Many spiritual traditions treat the present as a continuous eternal experience. Now, this moment, is the only moment in which transformation is possible, is happening. Even as systems of harm want us to think otherwise.

My word for 2026 is begin. If now is a state of attention and presence, begin is the movement born from that anchored place. The divine spark. Light itself. To begin is an act of initiation. It is the embodied extension of the now. It is what we choose in the face of despair, when grief and rage threaten to calcify into silence.

Begin comes from the Old English word beginnan, which shares a root with the verb meaning "to open, to make space." To begin is to occupy a contradictory state, to hold multiple truths. It means you must contain both vulnerability and power. Mourning and resistance.

To begin is not to insist on certainty. It’s a conscious choice to engage with the unknown. Begin is the fresh energy of The Fool combined with the action of The Magician. Shaping reality with what you have, refusing to disappear.

Begin is not a single moment but a series of small openings.

I begin every time I open my eyes, every time I sit down to write or slow down long enough to listen to my body, my inner voice, my internal compass. I begin by reaching out my hand. Parting my lips. Feeling my chest expand. Writing the first word. Saying the names that should not be forgotten.

Every day, to begin.

Again to the page.

Again to the body.

Again to love, even when it feels like falling.

Again to the world with an open heart.

Beginning again in Todos Santos, 2025 // photo by Joshua LaCunha