What the First Ordinary Day of the Year Teaches About Communion
Connecting breath, attention, and shared humanity as 2026 begins
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about what it shifted in you.
The holidays are over. The threshold has been crossed.
Today is the first ordinary day of 2026. No more solstice. No more Christmas. No more New Year’s Eve countdowns. Just Friday. Just January. Just the quiet return to regular life.
I am still reflecting. I am still implementing.
The turning of the calendar does not mean the inner work stops. If anything, this is when it begins in earnest. The insights gathered in the quiet days now meet the texture of daily life.
What This Week Has Been
This week I wrote about breath as connection.
We breathe what the trees exhale. They breathe what we exhale. We are participating in an exchange that includes every plant, every animal, every other person drawing breath right now. This is communion as physical reality, not metaphor.
I wrote about looking in the mirror before the threshold.
Seeing yourself without judgment. Releasing the need to conform to others’ expectations. Recognizing that peer pressure does not end with adolescence, it just changes form. The freedom that comes with choosing your own life.
I wrote about domains of attention instead of goals.
Walking as spiritual practice. Guiding contemplative pilgrimage. Teaching and writing. Three territories to tend rather than targets to hit. Questions to carry rather than boxes to check.
Now comes the integration.
Communion as Shared Experience
Communion is not just a spiritual concept. It is the recognition that we share common ground.
We share the experience of aging, of watching our bodies change, of meeting ourselves in the mirror and noticing time has passed. We share the weight of living in uncertain times, the climate grief, the political fractures, and the exhaustion of the past few years. We share the hope that something better is possible even when we cannot see how.
This is what connects us.
Not agreement on everything. Not identical beliefs or practices. The simple fact that we are all navigating the same human territory. Birth and death. Loss and love. Fear and courage. The slow work of becoming who we are meant to be.
When I write, I am not delivering conclusions from on high. I am processing in public. Thinking alongside you. Trying to make sense of my own experience in a way that might help you make sense of yours.
That is communion too.
Communion with the Living World
This week I left a movie theater with a heavy heart.
Avatar: Fire and Ash showed me, again, how fragile the rich connection of all life becomes when faced with greed. How easily we objectify what we do not understand. How military and economic systems reduce living beings to resources to be extracted.
The trees cannot write letters to Congress. The rivers cannot hire lobbyists. The creatures whose habitats are vanishing cannot advocate for their own existence.
Part of my work is to speak for what cannot speak for itself.
This is communion extended beyond the human. Recognizing that we are not separate from the natural world but woven into it. That our breath connects us to the trees, our bodies are made of the same elements as the soil, and our lives depend on systems we did not create and cannot fully control.
Ecospirituality is simply paying attention to this communion. Letting it shape how we live.
The First Ordinary Day
Today I return to my three domains.
Walking as spiritual practice. I will take a walk, not to accomplish anything, but to tend the well. To ask what the path is inviting me to experience and connect.
Guiding contemplative pilgrimage. I will continue preparing for the work of walking alongside others this year. Holding space without filling it.
Teaching and writing. I am doing it right now. Processing in public. Inviting you into my own learning and sense-making.
The holidays offered time for reflection. Now comes the practice.
What Communion Asks
Communion asks us to show up.
Not perfectly. Not with everything figured out. Just present. Willing to be part of something larger than ourselves. Connected to each other and to the living world through breath, through attention, through the simple recognition that we are all in this together.
The first ordinary day of the year is as sacred as any holiday.
Maybe more so. Because this is where the real work happens. Not in the special moments, but in the regular ones. Not in the thresholds, but in what comes after.
I am still reflecting. I am still implementing.
That is enough for today.
Walking with you into ordinary time,
~ Jeffrey
How are you carrying forward what you reflected on during the holidays? I would love to hear.
Walk With Me
If this resonates, I invite you to subscribe to Where Insight Meets Earth, my weekly reflections on contemplative walking, ecospirituality, and embodied practices for navigating what overwhelms us.
If you want to delve more deeply into this, I am launching the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary in March 2026—a year-long journey exploring Earth kinship through contemplative practice. Learn more here.
In September 2026, I’m leading a contemplative walking retreat on France’s ancient Le Puy Camino, seven days of silence, movement, and practices for metabolizing what sitting cannot, in the most beautiful landscape you can imagine, on a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage path. Details here.
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I love your insight about communion, in that it asks us to show up. To be present with others in a sacred act of compassion.
A sense of continuing to understand who we are WITHOUT making judgements.
A communion of dialogue, so to speak.