For the past several years we’ve invited UUCM members and friends to choose a word for year. A word to travel with, dance with in 2023. A word to keep in active conversation with your life throughout the coming year. On Sunday, during the service, I’ll invite you to share your word in a Word Cloud.
It’s tempting to think in terms of “should” or “ought” when searching for your word, or to seek a socially sanctioned self-improvement goal. I invite you to release that kind of pressure, and instead, to take time to be still and breathe, or to take the kind of walk or hike that liberates your most honest and open reflection, or get out your watercolors, or colored pencils, or fabric, or yarn, or clay making no demands on what will take form. Give yourself the gift of enough time to let the most true sense of who you are move closer to the surface, closer enough for you to feel what that most true “you” feels like. Spend some time quietly being with that “you.” In other words, find and spend time in your center.
Then, from that place, and allowing yourself spacious time, listen or watch or feel for the word that arises when you very gently imagine forward into your life. What words take shape? It may serve to ask yourself, “What idea, or value, or concept, or awareness, or image, or feeling speaks deeply to that truest sense of who I am?” What word rises most clearly?
Or you may have your own free and spacious way of discerning your word companion for 2023.
However you arrive at your word, I encourage you to find one and to journey with it. More and more often now, throughout the year, people share stories of how their word for the year has been interacting with their life and their awareness and helping them see and be in new ways. Such annual words are becoming deeper and deeper tools for more and more people.
What’s your word?
Rev. Kevin