The Expansion Year: How 2025 Opened My Eyes and My Heart
I ended 2024 with a surprising level of enthusiasm for the new year. Why? I’m not entirely sure. Was it wishful thinking? Or did I sense—somewhere in the quiet places of myself—that 2025 held a different kind of possibility?
In numerology, I was entering a One Year: a cycle of beginnings. Maybe that played a part. Or maybe I simply felt ready for something new after closing out the long arc of a Nine Year. Those years weren’t bad—just small steps toward… something. I didn’t yet know what.
Before I go any further, let me name something important:
I have my health.
My adult children are healthy, thriving, and mostly happy.
My grandchildren are growing, learning, and deeply loved.
We may be spread out, imperfect, and human, but we are a family.
And I am grateful.
Now… back to the question I keep circling:
What was I expecting from 2025? What did I want?
I honestly can’t remember. I only remember choosing a big word to carry with me into the year:
Expansion.
A wonderful word. A brave word. And in truth, I did expand—but not in the obvious ways. Not in the New-Year’s-resolution kind of ways that quickly dissolve into background noise.
I expanded inward.
I wandered down more rabbit holes than I can count—podcasts, thinkers, astrologers, economists, commentators. I listened, questioned, absorbed, and wrestled with what I found.
And what I found was this:
The world as we’ve known it is changing.
Subtly. Quietly. Almost imperceptibly unless you’re paying attention.
Yes, the divisiveness is visible. Yes, the outrage. Yes, the fractures in systems we once trusted.
But beneath all of that, something else is moving.
We’re being shown one set of events while another set unfolds offstage.
Digital IDs are on the horizon—marketed as convenient, but carrying implications far beyond convenience.
Global conflict continues to escalate.
A digital monetary system is coming, quietly, steadily, piece by piece, while many struggle with the day-to-day realities of life.
And spiritually?
That landscape is shifting too.
In my search for “expansion,” what I found was not a prettier version of spirituality but a truer one.
We are remembering something older than belief systems.
Something deeper than “love and light” mantras.
We are remembering sovereignty.
Not power over or power under—but the creative, healing, grounded power of being a whole human being with agency and wisdom.
Spirituality, if we’re being honest, is asking more of us now.
Not performance. Not bypassing. But embodiment. Presence. Responsibility. Connection to Gaia and to one another.
We are standing at a precipice of change—and while change is rarely comfortable, it is always constant.
There are two threads running through all of this, and they do tie together.
Yes, I had meaningful personal experiences this year.
Yes, I expanded.
But when I look back, it’s the simple things that make a year full:
conversations with my children,
laughter with friends,
small kindnesses exchanged with strangers,
and afternoons spent walking Sunny.
These are the moments that anchor a life. These are the moments that are at risk of being overlooked as the world shifts around us.
So now, as I turn toward 2026, I’m choosing my word with care.
This time, it has to be:
Unity.
Not the unity of sameness. Not the unity of agreement. But the unity of showing up for one another in a world eager to divide us.
Left or right. Right or wrong. Us or them.
None of that is the point.
What matters is how we live. How we care. How we help when we can. How we rest at night knowing we did our best—not perfectly, but presently.
If 2025 was the year of expansion, then 2026 is the year of coming together — within myself, with others, and with the world we’re all learning to navigate.
