Deadheading Roses

meditations on 2025

I’m just gonna say it: 2025 was a very bad year for me.

Lots of wonderful things happened and I’m grateful for them every day. I traveled, I wrote, I loved, I got to see and touch and hold so many long distance friends and short distance friends and old friends and new friends and friends of friends. I am lucky enough to be able to afford food, shelter, comfort. And even the chance to grow, to bend without breaking, is in and of itself a stunning gift.

But I was due for a hard year, honestly. 2020 was my last true wringer, and I had been living in rural mountainous bliss for four whole years undisturbed following that. Those four years were not with out challenges for growing pains, but overall, I felt like I had my life together and was in alignment with my values and goals. I had worked hard to cultivate stability and was reaping the benefits of that work. I had a pool and a rose garden and fresh eggs every day and was routinely running new PRs every week and hiking new summits every month. I was living in the wisdom and guidance of the seasons, in accordance to the wheel of the year, and felt very close to God (through Death, more on that to come). It was beautiful, and I knew in my gut it was temporary as all things are, so I tried my hardest to enjoy it while it lasted.

I don’t need to go over what changed—if you’ve been reading along with me all year you already know. I was suddenly thrust into a carousel of goodbyes: goodbye to my father, to my home, my animals, my life as I knew it, my careful routines, my metrics of success, my self-care and regulation techniques.

But as the new year approaches, I don’t want to talk about the goodbyes anymore. I want to talk about the hellos.

As I went through my camera roll from 2025 to select a handful of pictures to encapsulate the year, what I found is that since moving to LA, most of my photos are of flowers. Hibiscus, Peruvian lily, lavender, bottle brush, bird of paradise, magnolia, and so many roses, in every shade imaginable. I walked away from my rose garden, only to be surrounded in more roses. Roses so thick the smell of them is cloying if you stroll at night, when the sun is just setting and it’s breezy.

Since coming back here to my hometown, I have committed to growing things. It’s not that I hadn’t committed to growing things in North Fork, it was just harder (and easier), in some ways and I’ve had to change my approach and my entire definition of growth in order to make it happen. When we moved, the first thing we bought was a hibiscus bush and two Pothos plants. In North Fork we had too many cats for houseplants and the ice and pests killed so much of our outdoor garden, nature dictated our planting plans and we let her tell us what to do. Here, there are no seasons, so I have to tell myself what to do, and trust nature taught me well.

In North Fork only the roses really every thrived, year after year. In a halo around the pool, so thick they were almost monstrous. I have always loved roses—they’re an important motif in both tattoos and poetry: the sweet smell, the sharp thorn. A dichotomy, a contradiction. A plant with subtext.

One of the lessons I learned this year is that you cannot just wait for a wonderful life to find you. You have to commit to creating a wonderful life. Planting roses means dealing with the thorns. You cannot just bask in beauty and fragrance, you have to deadhead, you have to prune. I created a wonderful life, four years ago. I am tasked, now, with creating another.

That act of creation comes after a long, semi-dormant period in which I did a lot of pruning and deadheading. 2025 was the year of the wood snake in Chinese astrology— a year characterized by the shedding of many selves, many skins. All year long I shed. Homes, plans, dreams, objects, reputations. But I now realize that even before 2025 I was shedding. In North Fork my matron saint was Santa Muerte, she found me in 2020 and took my hand and changed the way I looked at the world. I homesteaded somewhere inhospitable and raised animals on a planet in peril, I invited the death-energy into my life and allowed her to cut things that no longer served me away with her scythe. My attachments, my egos, my vanity, my fear. I trimmed, I made myself smaller. I experienced loss after loss. A chicken to a hawk here, a goat to listeria there. Each one beautiful, in that it made me appreciate the fragile gift of life all the most intensely. Under her mantle I turned inward, because I needed to turn inward. I needed to peel and peel and peel and shed and shed and shed until all that was left was my strongest, purest, most essential self.

Oddly, since my dad died, Santa Muerte has slipped from my life, too. She used to be everywhere. Guiding me, counseling me, bridging this world and the next. But since moving, I see her infrequently. She still shows up occasionally, and I still love her dearly. But she is not a constant presence, and I have felt what can only be described as a spiritual severing of the umbilical cord that tied us together. Another thing her scythe has cut away. She’s chosen to let me go, which means, in turn, I must let her go, too. I feel grief around this, but I feel grief around everything these days. It is another goodbye, among many, and a year or so ago if you would have told me she’d leave, I would have been terrified and felt profoundly abandoned. But now, as it is happening, I mostly feel a strange brand of acceptance and understanding around it. She came to me to teach me a lesson, for a season of my growth, and that chapter—the death chapter—is coming to at least a temporary close.

So, what follows death? I haven’t known. Everything since my father’s death has been one big question mark. But lately, I’ve been settling on an answer. And it is, surprisingly—flowers.

I know I’m always talking about the things that grow from decay, but I am really, powerfully feeling it with a new understanding as 2025 shifts to 2026. I’ve spent years wading in the compost and meditating on death. My four years of bliss was in some years, a four year autopsy on my selfhood. A wallowing in filth, in roadkill, in meat harvesting, in horror. And now—whether I’m ready or not—it’s time for the explosion of growth to actually happen from that patch of earth I’ve so lovingly fed with bodies.

The things is, I am ready. I feel it, the shudder of a soon to be split seed. I know with certainty I have done the work, have spent my time learning from death, have poured my whole self into deadheading and now, I am fucking ready to become.

I don’t know what I will become, not yet. But I know I am on the verge of it, and that it is huge. New creativity, new ventures, new life. There is a powerful, exciting creature about to emerge from my shed skins, and she will be beautiful.

2026 is the year of the fire horse, and I could not be more ready to sit astride her and burn. Transformation of my childhood home into something distinct from my past and representative of my future. Breaking free from formerly restrictive patterns, their remnants falling away like old rope. Hooves, cutting into wet earth from which things are growing.

I needed that bad year. I needed those still, quiet, dead-beautiful years before it. I needed 2025 for what I am doing (creating a wonderful life) and what I will do (live my wonderful life).

HELLO! See you all then, amid fields of roses <3

Phoenix