December: a month many of us wrap presents for those we care about—a package of thinking of you, a package of love. Sometimes that present is a card or a text, a Facetime call or a Zoom gathering. It is the present of being present with someone, of being in community.
December also brings a reckoning of the year past: books read, trips taken, goals met and delayed. A time to consider what you want to continue doing in 2025 and what you want to alter in the new year.
I’ve been listening to John Green’s book The Anthropocene Reviewed. (Highly recommend, and on audio if only for the chapter on the Kauai o-o, a bird that was.) The chapter on orbital sunrises tells the story of the first art made in space by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. He sketched the view looking back at Earth. That perspective—the blue jewel of Earth in the black of space—makes me think of the vastness of the universe, the ongoingness of deep space. Here on planet Earth everything physical is finite: a bedroom, a house, the yard, a city has limits, states and countries have borders, our bodies stop at the outermost layer of skin.
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