My friend Eryn said she found her word for the year through bibliomancy, where you open a book, point your finger to a random spot on the page, and that’s your word.

Excited to try it, I opened my new book that I got for Christmas, Sophie Strand’s Madonna Secret, and pointed to. . .frightened. Nope. Try again. I pointed to. . .denying. Nope again. Third try is the charm, they say: Braver. Now I like that one. It feels process-oriented, not Brave, once and done, a state accomplished. But Braver, as in, “Today I can be a little Braver than I was yesterday.” Every day is just a little Braver than the last.

And it answers those first two words. Frightened? In denial? Be a little Braver. You don’t have to be Brave, just a little Braver than you were before.

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It seems my New Year dreams are trying to tell me something about living in the space between wildness and domesticity.

At first, I am rescuing four half feral kittens (who all clearly needed vet visits–one was shaking with a tremor) from a basement in which a sinkhole has opened up. I have to actually pull one falling kitten up out of the hole by its tail. (That feels so awful, but I know in the moment that it is the only thing I can do.) Then I have to carry them through a dark confusing city using a GPS that takes me through a hospital emergency room, to get them to a safe place, where it will be my job to get them medical treatment and to tame them so they don’t get into trouble again.

The second dream fragment I remember, I am walking down a hill in a rural area outside of a small village or town, and my friend who has glorious curly red hair is riding her bike up the hill past me. We are passing beautiful community gardens–not separate plots, but cooperatively farmed and tended gardens, with careful rows, and wooden structures, and even some arbors to protect plants that shouldn’t get direct sun. Without stopping her bike my friend calls out, “Hey! Make sure you check out the black fox kits!”

I look down the rows and into the little spaces created at the ends of the rows, but I cann’t find the kits. But as I am looking down one long row, at the end, I see a beautiful vixen, a gray fox, almost coyote, she is so big. She is blinking in the sun, and I see how tentative and timid she is, clearly staying away from the people working down the rows, and yet this is clearly her place too. So while it isn’t friendly interaction between people and fox, it is coexistence in what appears to be a healthy and symbiotic way.

My spiritual path, my inner work, has focused on me breaking out of the boxes of heterodoxy, exploring the wildlands beyond dogma and creed. This dream feels like it’s asking me to protect the ways in which the wildness seeps back into the gardens.

I’m curious that it was two distinct dreams, but joined by the theme of wildness and domesticity, and kits and kittens. The kittens needed to be handled and tamed, and the fox kits needed to stay safely hidden. Maybe my dreams are about discernment.