I can count on one hand the times when I have bolted upright in bed in a state of clarity that allows me to receive and preserve a dream’s message.

Last night’s dream came through my gut as I sat, alert, in the darkness.

Gravity. That was the message. It makes perfect sense.

Over the past year, I prepared for 2020 as if readying myself for a mission. I have mythologized the new year and decade with individual and collective narratives of hope and optimism.

Today, in the last hours of 2019, I am a racehorse at the gate and confidently ready.

I cannot be distracted with the usual New Year’s lists for self-improvement that get lost in the margins of the calendar’s first months.

Gravity, in all its meanings, is my resolution.

The new year pulls me to the ground with its weighty balance of solemnity and promise. As I prepare for an empty nest, I am calling back the parts of me that I let scatter, flotsam-like, within the decades of parenting and too much doing. There is a lean muscularity and precision in the new configuration. It has density.

I am returning to the things that are real – family, friends, community, and the earth.

I want to live in full embodiment – to feel my feet on the ground, see the faces of the people I love, work shoulder to shoulder for a common purpose, and be guided by my head, heart, and senses.

It is serious work. It takes sacrifice and discipline.

I feel the gravity.

“The trouble is, you think you have time.” Buddha

Endnote: The picture is of my husband’s Christmas dinner fortune cookie message.