Dear friends💜,

What a privilege to share this note with you on the first day of 2025. I am sending love and blessings to you for the days, weeks, and year ahead. This December was dark and cold in Iowa. We were blessed all year with long stretches of sunshine, but December was cloudy almost every day. This month I was able to slow down, rest, and light copious amounts of candles.

Maybe this holiday season is filled with grief for you, or maybe this holiday season is filled with love. I feel full of both. I lost my mother (my best friend) last May as well as a dear friend this November. I also have been blessed by time with my two beautiful, loving children and family.

I found myself contemplating the other day, "Do we need more grief to experience deeper love, or do we need deeper love to truly feel our grief?" Seasonally, and in many religions, it feels like we first must face the darkness to make room for the light. But hasn't the light always existed within us? I realized I put this contemplation into a poem I wrote a year ago:

This season is a profound time for expanding through both grief and love. Focusing on one or the other is so easy to do -- letting the darkness drag me under into deep depression, or getting caught up in the anxiety of holiday preparations trying to "create joy" and realizing I will never accomplish my unattainable goals.

Trying to balance both grief and love has been exhausting, hard work for me this past month. Nightmares that I thought I had resolved kept repeating, showing me areas for further healing. Other mornings I awoke feeling as if I were cocooned in love and warm light.

I did have more time to focus on my new album this month, which explores this journey. I can happily say that I have all ten songs recorded and am working with a videographer to make two simple music videos. I have quite a bit of editing to do, but I am hoping to present an album release concert the last weekend of March, which will hopefully be livestreamed :)

Today I am sharing with you an exclusive preview of a song which I wrote about anxiety/depression and how I experience it. It then transitions into the mantra you see below. By giving voice to my dark feelings, I have found both direction and healing.

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And, if you are looking for something new this year, consider joining me online in my new online community! I would love to get to know you deeply and share our journeys of healing. You can find a video of me explaining the community when you click this button:

If you are local to the Iowa City Area, I will be starting a separate publication "Knightingale News" that will come out in the middle of each month highlighting in-person opportunities, so please keep your eye out for that!

This year, I hope that you will find space in your heart and soul for grief and love to remember that "joy begun is joy eternal!"

Love and light,

💜Mary Jane Knight

$20.00 I Have A Voice, SATB Choral Octavo This is an empowering anthem perfect for a high school, community, or church choir. The music is accessible with two... Read more Get it now!

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