My word for 2025 was HOPE.

At the beginning of this new year, I reflected on how that word shaped this blog over the past year—because what I write here is always shaped by the world around me and the one within me. From this reflection I came to see how hope was threaded through the themes of the blog—life, relationships, nature, inner growth, and resilience:

1. Personal voice as witness

This blog exists as a platform to speak my truth—to give voice to what I observe and experience. That choice in 2025 was a metaphor for hope: not loud, but intentional and present. 

2. Creative expression as survival

Over the year I saw that creativity was less about expression and more about survival—a way to stay present when the days felt heavy and the world unsteady. And, hope appeared throughout the posts almost as writing itself—as a way to endure, to make sense of the disruptions and shifts of 2025.

3. Nature as mirror

In several posts I reflected on what nature kept teaching me—that hope is not urgency, but patience. Rain arrived without apology. Gardens grew on their own timelines. Slow seasons lingered. Quiet days endured. And I captured these shifts in poetry and prose.

4. Resilience in real life

Through poems like “Jamaica Strong” and “A Prayer for Jamaica,” I shared about the devastation of Hurricane Melissa on Jamaica in ways that moved beyond documenting an event. My poems spoke to the emotional toll carried by a nation and its diaspora. They embodied endurance, rebuilding, but more so hope rooted in community and persistence after loss.

5. Inner work as outer change

Reflections captured in poems like “Your Future Is Starving For You” and “Echoes of A Silent City” I was able to show how internal transformation and curiosity are acts of hope—belief in growth even when circumstances stagnate. 

6. Memory and renewal

Posts about memory (i.e. “The Taste of Memory” and rest (i.e. “Travelogue: La Quinta, A Retreat for the Soul”) spoke to hope as reconnection to self, to God, to what lasts beyond chaos. 

7. Relationship themes

In posts after posts I realize that I repeatedly go to love, timing, silence, and intimacy to inform my work. In 2025 these became markers of hope lived between humans—not in abstraction, but as intentional interpersonal choices. 

8. Prayer and spiritual grounding

Prayer has always been my mainstay. So undoubtedly there’d be prayer-centered posts. These posts placed hope in the spiritual—trust, surrender, praise—not as fantasy but as anchor when the world felt unstable.  

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In looking back on the posts of 2025, one thing became clear: hope was not written to promise ease. It was written to ask for attention. That may not have been my intention, but I showed up again and again—pen in hand, heart open—trusting that small acts of meaning still mattered.

Now we are in a new year. My word for 2026 is FORGET. It comes from the first verse I read in the Bible (using the App YouVersion) on the first day of the year; and, it also happens to be one of my favorite verses:

Happy New Year, WordPress fam!

Here’s praying for a year that brings newness to the places of your life where you need to forget the former things that stole your joy.

2026 All Rights Reserved

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In creative solidarity, Dee