Consummation

My word for 2026 arrived unexpectedly. I was deeply immersed in music and movement in the middle of a paddock in rural New Zealand, in the moonlight. The sound system was so powerful that it was vibrating through the air, lapping against my body like waves onto the shore.

The bodies around me were consumed by the music and sensations: the cool night air on hot skin, the coloured lights, a visual feast, exotic fabrics and strange silhouettes, the all-consuming soundwaves.

Eyes closed, body swaying, images flashed through my mind, shapes and colours, not quite coherent. There was a misty, coloured smoke, hues of pink and blue pouring into a large central cauldron in streams. The smoky streams swirled together, blending into a single writhing mass with flashes of green flames spontaneously igniting and consuming. There was a roaring in the vision. There was a feeling of alchemy, but I could not tie it to a single image. It was a feeling.

I knew intuitively that the streams of colour represented the different elements of myself. I saw them mixing together, and I felt the ignition, the consummation, the alchemy of the blended ingredients.

Consummation. I pushed the word away. It was overwhelming. It was an uncontrolled chemical reaction. It was the act of making something complete or fulfilled.

It was perfect.

And it was terrifying.

2025 was the year of the word, Integration.

With it, I expected a sense of completion to arrive. A sense of wholeness with the integration of the different worlds I inhabit all coming together in wonderful, destructive and creative ways. But ‘Integration’ did not feel like that at all. It was cruchy, like mismatched gears grinding together, breaking teeth and the searing sound of metal on metal.

This gnarly integration played out across my life: my marriage, the hardest year in ten, my business, breaking point, and mixed with joyous flashpoints like no others before them as magical moments were made possible only by shifting sands and unexpected growth.

Traumas and weaknesses were exposed in the storms, laid bare pulsating wounds covered until now by the safety with which we surrounded ourselves.

There was so much work to be done.

Work on our innermost selves, our business, our relationships.

2025 was a year of messy, gritty, integration. It brought moments of alignment that felt like magic, and it brought the need to intentionally upskill in unexpected areas.

It was grindy, …..and exactly what was needed to take the next steps.

As the cool night air pulsed with the wild energy of the messy writhing mass of humanity the cauldron in my mind filled with the smoky colours of integration and the all-consuming alchemical outcome.