A Four-Letter Word

for the New Year

A word I tried to extricate from ‘24 was Love.

Exhausted by misunderstanding and facile use, I thought it best to shy from it.

In ‘25, however, the plough is turning in the other direction.

With any luck, over the course of the year, I’ll be looking at various forms of what we translate as “Love” from at least four Greek words, and might even take a look or two at what St. Paul said about it here and there.

But whatever adventures in etymology entertain me, I’ll be looking into the Idea as Imaginative Empowerment — the esemplastic “beautiful and beauty-making power” that Coleridge wrote of so compellingly (and also so all-too-often naively).

What this all will look like, I don’t know. Probably not too different from the posts I’ve been posting over the past few months.

It is motivated by a very substantial year in my personal life in which I have had spiritual experiences that have allowed me to reach out to others in ways I have never done before.

Like anything, this has come through trial and error, some personal willingness to properly grieve lost lives while also acknowledging my own fault, and some new perspectives as to how I might better participate in the co-creation alongside friends and family while nurturing past and new relationships.

A Few Notes at Year’s End

You may have noticed I have developed a more frequent writing production this year.

While this has been challenging for me, it has also been rewarding — not least because it has seemed to grow my audience and engagement, while also bearing personal development both for my mind and my psyche.

I look forward to keeping this more rigorous strategy in the year to come, to the best of my ability.

Who I am, what style of writing I am prone to, and how my voice sounds and what sorts of things it tends to say, are mysteries to me — although I suspect that everything that comes will seem consonant with what I’ve previously produced while also yielding new ideational fruit.

My spiritual and psychological growth, my renewals daily toward a better shade of Being, my hopes, dreams, and desires all intermix in this aspiration and for, THAT

Thank you all for reading.

The number of you who open these emails each morning — you know who you are — has beguiled and delighted me.

Your co-creativity in this process brings me strength and Joy.

Thank you, thank you, thank YOU!

As you make your own commitments concerning the approaching year, and undergo your own reflections from this past, I’m thinking of you.

And with that, grinning and excited, I am

Yours,

Appreciatively,

Aaron