My One Word for 2023

Reconcile

I was nervous about having to come up with a word to succeed Freedom, because Freedom was such a good word for me and especially in 2022. Trying to come up with a word that could even approach how much Freedom helped me reorient myself to a lot of things felt like a daunting task. But it came.

One of my favorite books from 2022 was The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity by Cynthia Bourgeault. In it she describes a phenomenon called The Law of Three. It asserts that for anything to take place in the world three forces must be present: affirming force, denying (or I also offer resistant) force, and reconciling force. This law can be applied to interpersonal dynamics, intrapersonal dynamics, biological dynamics, etc. Here is a short example from Bourgeault herself. As she was defining the Law of Three, I understood that I have been working through my own triad of energies. For years I have felt stuck trying to establish a balance between myself as a pastor and a leader (affirming force) and myself as a domestic, a mother and wife and social laborer (denying force). There I felt caught in the very familiar, feminine lose-lose situation of trying to harmonize a career and family. Then, finally, a reconciling force arrived on the scene: myself as a mystic.* One of the hallmarks of the arrival of reconciling force is the easing of tense/rigid/anxious energy between the affirming and denying forces. Another characteristic of the arrival of reconciling force is that sometimes it can lead the affirming and denying forces to switch places. That's what happened for me. When I showed up in my own life as mystic, I felt more at ease within myself, more certain and easy. It also felt natural to move my domestic self into affirming position and myself as leader into denying position. Myself as mystic helped me to understand that no matter what comes my way, I will always belong first to my home. Instead of doggedly pursuing leadership, I shifted gears to make leadership dislodge me from the place of my hearth-keeping.

But I still have work to do to more consciously reconcile these parts of myself - domestic and leader and mystic. During 2022, my year with the word Freedom, I let myself get much looser in the way I approached things than maybe ever in my life. I spun out a lot of disparate aspects with little consideration of where they landed. Now I think it's time to nudge them into a tighter and more synergetic orientation to each other.

And, if I'm understanding all this correctly, these three aspects might switch places or a new triad might emerge, but that sounds like something for future Courtney to figure out.

For 2023, I'm looking forward to how these parts of myself might be reconciled and flow.

PS - For those who are interested, each year I order a token with my word on it from this website.

*The emergence of seeing myself as a mystic is the subject of the book that I'm writing and much too much to address here, but I'll just say that I define a mystic as someone who seeks intimacy with God-who-is-abiding-mystery.