In many northern cultural traditions, the first moon after the winter solstice marks the pressing need to prepare for the remaining harsh barren months before the onset of spring. It’s sometimes known as the Wolf Moon, after the howling canines still hunting in packs to sustain themselves on any prey not sensibly hunkered down in burrows or nests. This is a time of year when nature shuts up shop to conserve its energies. Sap retracts into root systems below the earth’s frozen surface; flora and fauna everywhere seek the warm protection of an interior world while the exterior appears to ossify and die. Life, quite literally, goes to ground.

While enjoying the cosseting benefits of life in the modern world, a winter hibernation is still never a bad thing to emulate. Periods of quiet introspection offer great opportunities to digest the past in order to clarify conscious future actions. Self-reflection as a counterpoint to the cold, dark world outside our triple-glazed windows can yield great dividends in the form of carefully imagined plans to implement as soon as favorable circumstances emerge. We too can productively go to ground, dream, gently repair our minds and bodies in the warm privilege of our modern caves, and fully recharge ourselves in preparation for the challenges and celebrations that lie ahead.

The first full moon of 2025 remains a poignant cosmological reminder at the start of a new calendar year to spend valuable time refining intentions for change and improvements in our lives. For many this might mean a firm commitment to New Year's resolutions regarding habitual behaviour, but few of us have the discipline to maintain the latest sensational dietary or exercise regimes. The often unrealistic expectations held in imposing these unusually specific challenges, sooner or later, set us up for failure.

Whilst this should not discourage us from challenging habitual learnt behaviours, there is a strong case to move away from the very specific, personally focused aspect of such intentions, toward thought, word and action where there is evidence of wider benefit and more likelihood of sustainable success.

Perhaps everything we have been conditioned to believe since childhood should be tested to see if it still rings true from our maturing perspective at the start of another new year. The great thing about truth is that it holds true universally, at all times. If something is true, it has to be true everywhere, or it's not true at all. There is no prerequisite belief, dogma, faction, subset, or separation for its perception or experience.

Objective truths don’t come from any seated authority, nor from any single research paper. Objective truths, established by repeated experiments that give consistent results, are not later found to be false. No need to revisit the question of whether Earth is round; whether the Sun is hot; whether humans and chimps share more than 98 percent identical DNA; or whether the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen.

(Neil DeGrasse Tyson)

Corroborated by relatively recent science, an objective truth we can all share is that life exists, and it’s impossible to disconnect or separate from it—even in death. This is not merely the informed preserve of remote, abstract quantum theory; it can be directly observed in our daily lives. There is individuation but no separation, everything relating to everything else on an essential and usually completely practical level.

Who and what are we, if not this great living truth itself? Do our measly, grossly reductionist, materialist opinions of ourselves energize that grander vision of self or the ongoing nightmare that rewards a privileged few at the expense of pretty much everyone and everything else?

Perhaps at the start of 2025 there is a heightened sense that we've been living something of a lie through previous years, a separatist delusion succinctly described by Albert Einstein in a written response to a rabbi seeking advice in explaining the tragic death of his daughter, a “sinless, beautiful sixteen-year-old girl,” to her older sister:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

This delusion, or False Self, the cozy image of ourselves as individual and autonomous, runs scared from the truth that it is a cultural construct, largely an accident of birth, and does not really exist. When our body is all we think we are, is it any wonder we develop a fear of it dying? It's all we know and have.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

(Marcus Aurelius)

This False Self is terrified of death because it generally struggles to locate any long-term life-affirming alternative, consequently focusing entirely on the short term instead. This self has no substance, no permanence, no inherent vitality, only various forms of immediate gratification to grant it validity.

Put another way, its opposite - the True Self - that which is 'the whole of nature in its beauty', is confident in its eternal presence; regularly enjoys life affirming experience; knows it does not die, therefore holds little fear of loss or the 'ending' death appears to provide. The liberation of which our beloved Albert speaks, stems from his own scientific observation of the constant dance of rebirth in the natural world and cosmos he venerated.

In all of nature, one form has to die and decay for another to take over, so this pattern should be obvious and clear, although it is largely not - until you really observe or actually study the patterns of everything. Again, we [humanity] appear to be in gross denial.

(Richard Rohr)

What if the seismic shifts that we have witnessed in years past point to the need for certain misperceptions to be reborn in new ideas and experience, closely aligned to truth, that can evolve into a more sustainable, harmonious, intelligently symbiotic 'whole of nature' on Earth. Sadly, this is not likely to be commensurate with human activity continuing to heat Earth’s atmosphere at unprecedented rates, contributing to 2024’s unfortunate accolade of being the hottest year on the planet since records began.

Are these huge planetary shifts a call for recognition from our True Self, the energetic spark that connects us to everything in existence? Some refer to that common spark as the Divine, the Sacred or Spirit: that which nurtures everything in existence toward inexorable change. Our willful ignorance of this immeasurable animating breath, inherent to all things, allows us to commit sacrilegious acts - war, genocide, murder, torture, physical and sexual abuse, imposed poverty, starvation, environmental degradation to name but a few human curses - blithely divorced from the understanding that, in truth, we commit these atrocities against no one but ourselves.

We should gratefully point out, that the True Self, of which we are all part, is never in peril. It may come as a relief that ultimately existence is safe from human interference, securely held in the unified energetic field of all that is and ever will be. Phew. However, under this Wolf Moon, the False Self, that diminished, separated, peculiarly human view of ourselves and our conduct, could do with being called into serious question.

How do we actually want to see ourselves? As units of labour, victimised pawns in the consumerist, commodified paradigm, continually fighting for little victories, often perpetuating the misery of others? Or, conversely, as a walking miracle - the embodiment of Life itself, actively involved in an eternal, naturally expansive cycle of perpetual win-wins? A lie or the Truth? A choice or an imperative?

At the start of a new year, it might serve us well to reflect on how our thoughts, words and actions can contribute to impending transformations, whether we like that dynamic or not. How we perceive and react to shifts in circumstance, with fear or with love for example, will dictate the magnitude of the potential catastrophe or blessing they represent.

It may sound disconcerting, but there's a suggestion here that those of us with the courage to do so, should consciously face our worst fears and through them experience a death or two before we die. The chances are that we’ll have to face those fears prior to our deathbed anyway, if not on it. To intentionally hasten the demise of the False Self, however uncomfortable the process, is to allow the rebirth of the True Self (Albert's 'foundation for inner security') for as long as the eternal divine continues to enliven our temporary form. Reborn in this way, we are released to live a joyful, liberated life that contributes purposefully to the process of intelligent evolution rather than impeding its progress.

The challenges we have faced during 2024 may have initiated some of those deaths before death. They will certainly have touched a few nerves. Whilst difficult to welcome with open arms, many wisdom traditions suggest that these trials occur to be accepted and assimilated, not fought against. The suffering they provide is the common path, long traversed by those varied traditions as a direct route to enlightened awareness and worthy of exploration.

We shall not cease from exploration.

And the end of all our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.

(T. S. Eliot)

As tends to be the case for the lunar sensitive amongst us, instinctive emotional reactions and habitual patterns of behaviour will be hitting their peak this week. Yet, under this year opening Wolf Moon we are presented with an opportunity to move closer to the truth of who and what we are.

So let’s keep things real by providing a little cosmic context to help reletavise the magnitude of our own life experience within a reasoned perspective: our sense of self accumulates around a physical body that walks upon a relatively tiny planet (an accumulation of stardust) in an average to small galaxy containing over 100 million stars such as our sun, which exploded into existence 4.5 billion years ago. Our average-sized but awesome galaxy (13.6 billion years old, give or take) is one of an estimated 2 trillion galaxies with similar densities of stars in the observable universe—and our means of observation are still fairly limited. By anyone’s accounting, that’s a lorra lorra planets orbiting a lorra lorra stars in a lorra lorra galaxies.

Such context is not meant to diminish the value of our life experience on Earth in any way. It merely seeks to differentiate between personal truths and objective truths. In the cosmic scheme of things, the relevance of the belief systems that give rise to humanity’s self-destructive tendencies is beyond minimal. Human ‘stuff’ just isn’t really that important—other than to humans. It sounds harsh, but most of us in the modern world are living a lie about who and what we are, which tends to make us sick and unhappy. We firmly believe in and fiercely defend our own inherited rhetoric, yet it’s nothing but an indoctrinated, culturally conditioned, severely restricting limitation on any positively reimagined future for people and planet.

From a perspective of what is true, we are better placed to find solutions to the problems we have created for ourselves in our personal and collective lives for the benefit of All. A secure foundation of common truth allows individuals and societies to find hope and enjoyment where previously it was thought impossible. The quirk of cosmic fate that gave us life simultaneously birthed the possibility of joy, wonder, and peace. Given the liberty of choice, why resolve to live this fleeting experience in any other way?

What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

(Carl Sagan)