Setting The Year Down

Sweet humans,

Chinese New Year begins today, February 17, and I really feel this in my bones. Though I am not Chinese, I appreciate the wisdom in a calendar that follows the moon and honors cycles. As 2025 comes to a true close, I find myself wanting to speak to the year I’ve just lived. I’d like to set it in the ground, say thank you, and wish it farewell.

What I experienced, I can only describe as a deep existential ache. One that couldn’t be soothed by much at all. I moved through the chapter largely alone, without much time or resources to reach out for support. I took care of myself, as I usually do. But there were moments when my own care failed me, and my ability to see the way forward blurred.

This ache showed up in two ways that weren’t separate from one another.

One was physical. A gnawing, sharp pain in my abdomen would appear and disappear, often accompanied by excruciating nausea, bloating, sleepless nights, and brain fog. This isn’t a new pain, yet it remains undiagnosed. The uncertainty alone has worn me down.

The other was more existential. Modern isolation. The absence of group-oriented living. Shared ritual. Embodied interconnectedness. I missed the kind of meaning that isn’t philosophical, but rather lived and participated in.

Last week I watched the 1990 film Dances with Wolves. I absolutely loved it. In the story, John Dunbar says he doesn’t know who he was before. Only after integrating into a neighboring Native village, participating in daily life, did he begin to understand himself.

Meaning arrived for him not through a grand mission, but through belonging to a web — what humans once called a village.

That was the shape of my ache. And how human?!

Perhaps this oversimplifies things, but I want to share what carried me through. Because even in the brutality, there was something to be harvested. Over the last year, beauty became my tether to the web of life. It was the soothing balm.

I began to notice that beauty rescued something. It restored meaning where things became lifeless or too painful for to bear.

The beauty I speak of?

Art.

Nature.

A person.

A feeling.

An act.

Animate or inanimate. Physical or abstract. Ordinary or otherworldly.

When structure collapsed for me, beauty held my attention. When hope felt thin, beauty was there. Without spectacle, she waited for me. I’m not talking about the kind we consume for consumption’s sake, but the kind that regulates. The kind that adds real aesthetic and spiritual weight to a life.

The kind that a n o i n t s.

It doesn’t quick fix anything. But it mends, slowly and truly.

Beauty. It can be the way morning light hits a wall in your house. Two old men sitting with fishing poles off a dock, smoking in silence. A baby taking her first steps. Wildflowers breaking through sidewalk concrete. Children laughing without knowing why. It can be anything.

As I write this, I’m watching clean laundry flow in the wind as it dries under the sun. I notice that it’s beautiful, and I let myself watch for more than a few seconds before continuing.

Beauty asked just one thing of me.

T O N O T I C E.

To become a MASTER AT NOTICING.

As humans, we are meant to notice the wonders of this world and live in awe of them.

Before doom-scrolling, we looked up at the sky. Before Zoom meetings, we walked and listened to birds. Before 9–5 schedules, we ate slow breakfasts with people we loved.

Beauty.

It pierced the numbness I felt, reminding me I was alive. It pulled me back from cynicism when people or systems failed me. It softened my grief. It made me more generous. When chaos felt overwhelming, it added weight to the other side. It offered co-regulation. It became proof of goodness, evidence I could see, hear, and touch.

Beauty is ancient, perhaps the oldest regulator our eyes have ever known.

Modern life teaches us to regulate ourselves through outsourcing, output and discipline. But when those fail, and they will, beauty is there. Beauty is not random, not frivolous, and not just about taste. Beauty is about order. Coherence, pattern, and harmony. The rightness of things fitting together.

Especially as women, our nervous systems constantly scan for safety and rhythm. When we encounter all forms of symmetry and proportion, our bodies settle. Our heart rate slows. Our breath deepens. Our soft body reads order as safety.

A sunset, for example, is ordered light scattering through atmosphere. Music is patterned vibration moving through time. The spiral of a shell, the branching of trees, the geometry of a snowflake.

And this is true for relationships too. When a friend or partner shows up consistently — emotionally, mentally, and practically — there is a kind of beauty in that predictability. A coherence. The nervous system relaxes because something is reliable.

Beauty feels like a glimpse of what I might call the original blueprint. It doesn’t erase suffering. But it reminds us that chaos is not ultimate. To notice beauty is to momentarily align yourself with coherence. To let your Body and Espiritu come back into rhythm with this something… ancient.

Beauty is essentially delightful order, and when we are fragmented, order is mercy.

As the snake sheds what no longer fits, and the horse carries us into what we cannot yet see, let us notice beauty. I want this year ahead to be a year that you make yourself beautiful too. That you adorn yourself with what feels life-giving and engage in learning the ways that help you feel well. That you remain open to absolute, unexpected encounters and miracles.

As we set the year down, as we lay to rest the brokenness and challenges of the last one (because I know this has been a theme for many), let us walk into this one with focused eyes, attuned and ready to notice all that is in front of us.

You’re beautiful.

Love Atara