writing – Latansani

On Christmas Eve, we carry gifts, carefully wrapped, hidden under twinkling lights, each one chosen with thought and love. Some are small, some grand, but all are offered with the hope that they will bring joy. The gifts we carry are not only the ones we set under a tree. Each of us carries other offerings: our hearts, love, and hope.

As a celebrant, I bring those gifts daily. I stand with people at the most sacred thresholds of their lives.

I witness beginnings and endings, holding joy, grief, hope, and rupture. I speak words when others cannot find their own. I bless unions, honour deaths, and mark moments that will be remembered long after the day itself has passed.

But behind the role and ritual, behind the calm and carefully chosen language, there is a most simple human being. Another thinking, feeling, vulnerable person who also needs the gift of love and care.

2025 has been for many of us, a year of severance. It has been a year of letting go, and not always by choice. I saw it in the ceremonies I held and felt it in my own life. People losing – work, partners, relationships; losing possibility, as well as certainty; and people losing the deep belief that true love is real, that love is something we can rely on to see us through. To lose faith in love is not just painful; it is devastating, decimating, disorienting. It breaks our resolve and shakes the entire ground beneath.

There have been moments this year when I wondered whether love was still possible in the way I had once believed in it – not as a means of rescue, not as fantasy, but as something steady and real.

And yet, again and again, the couples I married this year gently challenged that doubt. I watched them stand before one another not promising perfection or salvation, but presence. They chose love with eyes open, aware of each other’s histories, complexities, and unfinished edges. Their vows were not about being rescued, but about walking alongside; not about grand gestures, but about daily devotion. In their steadiness, their laughter, their willingness to be fully seen, they reminded me that love does not need to be loud to be profound. It simply needs to be true.

This year, I was also held by a very different kind of love – the love of my granddaughters.

Their love is innocent and pure, unburdened by history or expectation. It does not ask me to be anything other than present. In their eyes, I am already enough. Their laughter, their small hands reaching for mine, their unguarded trust reminded me of a truth we so easily forget: love, at its essence, is simple. It is not earned. It is given freely. Being with them returned me, again and again, to a place before doubt…before stories of loss and protection took hold. They showed me love as blessing, not transaction.

And then there is the love that brings us all here on earth – the journey to love ourselves.

Self-love is not indulgence or ego; it is responsibility. It is choosing to care for the part of ourselves that feels deeply in a world where hurt can be inflicted so easily, often unintentionally, as others move through their own journeys of pain, fear, and becoming. To love oneself is to learn when to open and when to protect, when to soften and when to stand firm.

Rising above hurt does not mean bypassing it. It means seeing it clearly, tending to it gently, and refusing to let it harden the heart. It means recognising that another’s wounds do not define our worth, and that compassion can coexist with boundaries.

What I am beginning to sense now, as 2026 approaches, is a different invitation to love.

Love, I am learning again and again, is about being seen.

Seen in our grief.

Seen in our contradictions.

Seen in our strength and in our exhaustion.

Seen without needing to be more polished, more healed, more “together.”

2026 is the year to be seen! This is the spirit I feel gathering…

A year of connection…not just between partners or families, but between our inner lives and our outer ones. A reconnection to self, to meaning, to one another. A softening back into relationship.

A year of gratitude…the kind that arises naturally when we survive something difficult and discover that tenderness is still possible. Gratitude for the people who hold us, the rituals that ground us, and the quiet moments that restore us.

A year of creation…new ceremonies, new ways of marking life, new language for love and loss. Creation that flows not from obligation, nor from ritual but from truth.

And a year of richness…richness of feeling, of presence, of spiritual depth. Oh, I hope that there will be material abundance too. But above all, I hope that this year, my life and the lives of those around me will feel inhabited rather than endured.

As I prepare to gift others through weddings, farewells, namings, and renewals in the year ahead, I am also tending to my own heart. I will allow myself to be held. To be rested. To be seen.

Because even those who guide others through rites of passage are always, quietly, moving through one of their own.

On this Christmas Eve, as you carry your gifts and watch the faces of those you love, may you also pause to honour the invisible treasures you carry – the courage, compassion, and love that make life sacred.

Merry Christmas!

Julie

Popular music is full of powerful messages about love – not just romantic love, but the kind that helps us see ourselves more clearly and kindly. From lyrics that promise, “You make me feel like I’m enough” to ballads that speak of being seen and accepted, there’s a recurring theme: that the love of another can reflect back to us the beauty we often overlook in ourselves.

I hear some of the most beautiful lyrics and emotional melodies at the weddings I conduct…From John Legend’s “Love your curves and all your edges / All your perfect imperfections” to Jame Morrison’s “You make me smile like the sun / Fall out of bed / Sing like a bird / Dizzy in my head”
They resonate with the idea that love isn’t just about connection; it’s a mirror, gently revealing the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten or never dared to admire.

It’s this deeply human idea, that we sometimes need others to help us see beyond our self-doubt, that inspired the poem Self-Perception, Self-Deception. It’s a reflection on how we can become trapped in a one-sided view of who we are, and how liberating it can be when someone else’s love opens a window to a fuller, kinder perspective.

Self-perception…self-deception

I walk alone through shadowed wood, my thoughts like a quiet tide,
Believing I am carved in stone: one truth, one face, one side.

“I am the weak,” I told the trees, “my footsteps slow and small,”
And every leaf that brushed my cheek seemed to endorse it all…

I wear my flaws like heavy chains, a tale I know so well,
I fed the fire of my self-doubt each time I tripped and fell.

But came a voice, both kind and strange, that echoed through the pine,
“You see yourself through cloudy glass but that’s your view, not mine.”

A mirror made of other eyes was held before my eyes,
And in its light I saw anew…a self I had not surmised.

“You’re brave,” said one, “though you can’t see that the storms you walk are wide.”
“You’re kind,” said two, “in quiet ways that slip beneath your pride.”

“You’re more,” said three, “than shame and doubt, more than you daily rehearse
Your story isn’t just one single-thread, and nor are you wholly cursed.”

And suddenly the chains grew thin, like mist beneath the sun,
The truths I’d claimed were not the whole – they were merely part of one.

For every fault, a strength was there, in balance, and not in disguise,
And I? I’m neither monster nor saint, but a human, who’s full and who’s wise.

So now I walk with softer step, no longer self-confined,
My eyes still mine, but richer now with other views combined.

Let no one write their tale alone, nor wear one mask for too long
The self we know is but a verse in another’s fuller song.