Planting the Garden of 2025

by Devanna Wolf

It's December 31 and here we all are once more, chalking up the deeds of 2024 and starting to clarify the road ahead for 2025.

I don't love "New Year Resolutions" but I appreciate the spirit of setting intentions and cultivating the ground to begin manifesting them. There is definitely a fertile vibe-shift that happens when we all collectively start resetting our psyches and writing a new digit at the end of the millennial year.

Wanting it All

When you commit yourself to "living in the magic," as my friend, sister, and mentor Yeshe Matthews calls it, it's simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Your awareness of what is gloriously possible expands so greatly, you can't help but hunger for it...which in many ways countermands the purpose of developing a spiritual discipline.

We are all of us prone to addictions or obsessions of one sort or other, aren't we? In trying to find a word for "all consuming love of a thing," the internet gods gave me:

A little mania in certain areas is a good thing. If we have nothing more than a general enthusiasm for a thing, perhaps we're not doing it right? 

We should always yearn for moments of Awe, Connection, Revelation, and Magic. They make life worth living.

But in this modern age when the illusion of everything we could ever desire is at our fingertips in the ocean of the internet, sometimes that hunger can hoodwink and derail us. Is ADHD a biological reality that has always existed in human consciousness, or is it a vague predisposition of neurodiversity that we've potentiated at exponential lightning speed in this information age? 

I don't know the answer, but I do know that the more I expose myself to what I think will satisfy my hunger, the more it damned well grows. 

In the Garden of Magic, it's good to be the Hoe

George R.R. Martin has famously referred to himself in his writing career as a gardener. 

“I often said that writers are of two types.

There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.
And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.
No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.”
I am no architect, despite my Capricorn Sun and great desire for order and structure. I have a tendency to hold my goals, aspirations, and general life circumstances pretty loosely, in order to be always free to adapt to new possibilities. (Or perhaps to avoid accountability, maybe a bit of both.) The risk in this is that I don't define what I actually want clearly enough to take clear steps to manifest and work toward it. That's where I need the architect's consultation. Somewhere in between is a happy medium that I will strive for, the Gardenarch.

So in the spirit of rolling up my sleeves and putting on my gardening gloves for 2025, I've written up some guidelines for my frequently runaway mind and creativity. I could probably narrow the questions down further, but I want to give myself permission to return to these specific topics whenever I get too far afield.

I'm in the process of asking and answering some questions for myself that I hope will give me a little enclosure to circle back to when I veer too far off my chosen path into the endless rabbit holes of intrigue. For now, I'm just going to till that fertile ground of possibility.

1. What do I want to learn

(Armenian Language)

2. Where do I want to delve deeper

(Hekatean and Dionysian Mysteries)

3. What do I want to teach

(Visionary Awareness)

4. What do I want to create

(Sacred Art in various forms)

5. What do I want to channel

(Wisdom and Will of my Goddesses)

6. What do I want to facilitate

(a Space for Devotion and Exploration of Deities and Spirits of my Ancestral Lands)

7. And finally, what do I want to call in

(Financial Ease, Sacred Travel, and Liberated Love)

How would you answer these questions for yourself?

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