This year feels extra fertile, exciting, and feral. There’s a sense of unknown adventure and uncharted maps to navigate by True Heart’s North. Having just entered Aquarius season yesterday, I’m feeling the extra liberating vibes that come through grounding into the essence of who we each are so that authenticity illuminates.

We’re also nearing the Chinese Lunar New Year, which will be on January 29th. This ignites the year of the Wood Snake.

Themes for the Wood Snake include strategic evolution, resiliency, adaptability, wisdom, intuition, creativity, fertility, longevity, and shedding your way to renewal on deeper levels. This is a complete transformation that will come to us all individually and collectively by way of moment-to-moment opportunities for shedding away all the build-up we’ve been shouldering out of acceptance with discomfort. The shedding could look messy for a while, as the old skin of years gone by peel away layer by layer. How far we each want to shed is up to us. Some may shed one or two layers and others may undo them all. Sometimes we’re invited into more shedding than we thought we may want, but highest good is always at work even if we don’t realize it.

Transformational beginnings can be a welcome part of every single day this year with the mysterious and ingenious Wood Snake by our side.

2025 is a number 9 year for the collective, numerologically speaking, and so there is the energy of completion, methodical growth, and compassionate connections that lead to enlightened paths. It’s a year for introspection before action and being in resonance with universal wisdom for greater good. A number nine year carries the potential for long-term achievement.

The Wood Snake urges us to be more present with conscious awareness so that we align with divine timing to embrace the perfect moments that offer greatest results and minimize energetic output.

Snakes are silent creatures of great alchemy, but this comes with a need for balance and deeper listening so that opportunities aren’t missed, while hidden challenges are avoided.

For me, I’ll be moving forward steadily with my intentions and plan to keep focused, consistent, and committed to the new unearthed energy from my personal closure I invoked pre to this new year.

Our amaryllis plant ended up budding four more giant blooms on the second pod, bringing us to nine total beauties for the season – pretty cool mirroring of our number nine year we’ve entered. The first pod of five has already passed, but the second pod is still going strong. Once they are done I will try my hand at keeping the plant going, too, and seeing if I can get it to regenerate for next season. It’s a first time I’ll be trying, so we’ll see how it goes.

The birds continue to stick around and the doves continue finding sanctuary around our home.

Here you can see them tucked in under the sage bush and cedar tree just outside our bedroom. There were eight total – five showing in the photos.

Winter has been more like very early Spring so far.

After the initial storms blew in, we’ve had sunny days with very brisk temperatures and melt-off at lower levels, with no precipitation all of January so far, although this Saturday a storm is predicted.

This has made hiking still possible if not venturing too high up where the thicker snow accumulations are.

Perhaps we’ll have a later Winter, like last year.

And the snow will stick around into early Summer.

Everything changes on a dime so things move quickly and unpredictably.

For now we’re embracing what is and enjoying the gifts to be grateful for.

On Thursday’s hike by the lake I found this beautiful and quite large nest I’ll be adding to my growing nest mobile.

That followed this Northern Flicker’s wing coming to me as a beautiful gift as well.

The all orange side is the under wing and the black, orange and spotted side is the outer wing.

I get renewal, transformation, fire and phoenix energy, which all feels aligned with the Snake year. And that liberation energy is again resounding that I began this post with.

We keep finding naturally wood carved seahorses when out on hikes – I think we’ve seen about five so far. They mirror the wood carved giant seahorse we have in our home on the fireplace mantle, which you can see highlighted by the rainbow sun rays to the right in this photo from Christmas time.

These patient and safe navigators of the deep sea of emotions and subconscious-made-conscious, are magickal way showers.

Sign posts continue to guide the journey like a treasure map of course alignment.

And then on Saturday afternoon, it was bobcat that showed up again as we made our way home from a hike. This is now the third encounter we’ve had with bobcat – the first, young one showing up on our deck outside our bedroom, the second (whom I believe was a blynx – bobcat/lynx hybrid) in Yosemite as the shapeshifting dimensional walker, and now a third.

This one was quick, so no photos possible, but deliberate in timing and out in the light of day, once again.

A large bobcat jumped out from the brush and forest on our right, as we were driving down the road. The bobcat proceeded to run across the street in front of us and then jumped into the brush on the left, disappearing altogether.

I know we were meant to see this being and I find that each time the bobcats show up has been at pivotal energy shifts that are important.

We are in a year of significant transformation.

I feel that what ever we decide to individually and collectively focus our energy on can create impactful ripples for the years to come.

Be discerning with your energy and commitments.

And continue to nurture your needs to keep things in balance.

I’ve been riding my own journey with cautious reflection about each choice I’m presented with.

While we can also choose again, I want to choose with fullest awareness as opposed to choosing blindly as a predictable knee-jerk reaction.

This is a new energetic landscape for us to cocreate in.

May we create with greater consciousness and alignment.

Quick Crystal Update:

There was only one remaining crystal, but I just added four more listings recently. I listed a couple without an announcement, but one of those pieces was discovered and homed already. I then added two more listings, so there are currently four options to find your energetic match for anyone who may be looking for a crystal partner. This includes two truly special, one-of-a-kind singing skulls, lapis lazuli cosmic eggs since many of you love this stone as much as I do, and the enchanted spirit/faery quartz. There is a blue theme going on because that is one of the key energies that channels through to me to share. I encourage exploration of descriptions along with photos and videos, unless you just already know. I also added several newbie Tahoe Quartz & Sierra Smoky/Citrine listings and updated some with new videos as well. And again, for these personal finds I’m donating proceeds to rescue rabbits. So grateful for all that I’ve been able to send in already – thank you! Other than Tahoe Quartz, I do not foresee listing anymore crystals or crystal skulls in the near future, as no one else has shared a desire to move forward or even hinted at that.

Crystals & Crystal Skulls