What carries us forward

As 2025 draws to a close, many of us find ourselves standing in a familiar, tender place, carrying the weight of a year that changed us.

A Year That Asked Us to Pause-

No one moves through a year untouched. In 2025, each of us encountered moments that hurt us, saddened us, unsettled us, or quietly broke something open. There were events that crushed expectations, altered relationships, reshaped futures, and asked more of us than we thought we could give. There were also moments that surprised us — that excited us, moved us, or reminded us why we keep showing up to life even when it feels heavy.

And like all the years before us, 2025 was no different. We experienced loss.

We lost beloved family members, friends, elders, teachers, and companions. We also grieved the passing of public figures who, in ways both quiet and profound, felt woven into our lives.
Their voices, stories, music, writing, and presence lived alongside us, shaping our inner landscapes and shared culture.
When they died, something shifted within us. Their presence did not disappear — it changed form, asking us to carry memory differently and drawing us into a deeper relationship with time, meaning, and love.

Alongside these losses, there was another kind of death this year as well — a quieter, transformative, metaphysical one.

Versions of who we were before certain conversations happened.
Before diagnoses, endings, reckonings, or realizations arrived. Before something fell apart and could not be put back together as it was.
These losses are rarely acknowledged out loud, but they matter just as deeply.
A year like 2025 does not pass without asking us to shed skins we once believed were permanent. 

2025 carried the reflective energy of the Hermit — a year that asked us to pause, to look inward, and to walk our paths more deliberately and alone. The Hermit and the Tower share a striking resemblance: the same narrow peak, the same downward gaze, the same confrontation with truth from a height we did not expect to reach. Both ask us to look honestly at our lives and decide — do we steady ourselves and continue, or do we allow what can no longer stand to fall away?

Many of us tried to remain centered while the world around us was unstable and unfamiliar. In that inward, searching space, we tended our gardens with care. We planted what we could, knowing that nothing in a single season is guaranteed. Gardens are not meant to flourish all at once; they are begun, paused, weathered, and returned to.

What we started in 2025 was not meant to be finished there. Much of it will continue to grow quietly over the coming years, shaped by patience, timing, and trust rather than urgency.

And through all of it, something remained.

A steady thread of connection.

The moments of connection.

The conversations.

The quiet moments.

The questions spoken out loud — and the ones held gently inside.

I was honored, again and again, to witness these moments with you.
To sit in spaces where honesty was allowed to breathe. To hold stories that mattered. To have conversations that illuminated. To feel safe in loss — and even safer in healing. To open pathways we weren’t yet sure existed. To distinguish truth from illusion. To make friends of strangers, and to reunite with parts of ourselves that had been waiting to be seen again.

What Carried Us Through-

What carried us through was not certainty. It was love.

Love as a guidepost. Love as a center. Love as the unseen hand that holds ours when we feel unsteady. Love as the gentle touch that wipes a tear we didn’t realize was falling. Love as the warmth we feel when sunlight hits just right, and we know — without proof — that something beyond us is near.

Love showed up in the smallest ways. In the whisper to add salt while stirring soup. In the reminder to lock the door before bed. In dreams that arrive uninvited but feel familiar. In a sudden scent — perfume, cigarette smoke, cigar, pipe — that carries memory like a living thing. In the graves we visit with our feet, and the ones we visit only with our hearts.

Love is how we remain in relationship — physical and nonphysical.

It is how we stay connected — to those who came before us, to those who walk beside us now, and to ourselves as human beings moving through time. As the years increasingly show us the limits of our bodies, our energy, and our control, something deeper becomes clear: the soul knows no such limits.

As we say thank you to 2025 and gently release it, may the lessons it offered stay with us. May what no longer serves us be allowed to fall away. And as we welcome 2026, may it reveal what seeks to express itself — and may we be given the patience, clarity, and tools needed to nurture what is ready to grow.

Whether we met in person, over Zoom, by phone, or through an emailed tarot message, I was honored to witness these moments with you.

With gratitude and so much love,
Jennifer Belanger
Intuitive Practitioner
Where love never ends

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