2025, the month before Christmas. We have waved goodbye to Diwali, to Bonfire Night, to Remembrance Sunday, to summer. We have witnessed Hurricane Melissa’s devastating path through the Caribbean, a typhoon hitting the Philippines, raging forest fires around the world, that took out many lives, thousands of homes upending comfortable lives and unrealised dreams. We have witnessed men in masks on American streets grabbing people, hard stopping cars, leaving children parentless. Protests outside places that offer sanctuary. Rage and bullying spreading like a virus, giving strength to those needing meaning in their lives, however it comes. We have felt injustice in our very bones, and a heaviness in our heart. In short we have witnessed a time of great upheaval, distress, change and uncertainty. And we are all grieving. No-one can escape the great grief that encompasses the earth. Once it may have seemed far away and only affecting those ‘unfortunate’ to be in the wrong place. But 2025 has shown us that there is no ‘right place’. There is only THIS place. In this place where we are, we have to look in a new direction. For if we look, we can find stories of hope. We see the homeless man being given keys to a new house, a community surround a car with taken people inside, and refuse to let it pass, we see a stuck deer rescued after its offspring, Bambi eyed, knocks insistently on a back door and the inhabitant follows not knowing where. We see shards of light and joy and laughter and humour and love and beauty and greenery and waterfalls and cute animals and marches, and protests and revolutions and pride reclaimed. We see Gen Z awakening and roaring, and old men shaking in their wake. We are in the vein of Dickins, in the best and worst of times. We didn’t and wouldn’t choose a lot of what’s happening, but we can choose what we look at and how we act. We HAVE to.
