20 January 2026
On a personal level, I’m calling 2026 the Year of the Lavender.
It’s a whimsical moniker—based solely on the color of my new notebook and the book of Mikko Harvey poems I bought to start the year.
Each morning, I write a page, and I read Harvey’s poems, pairing my coffee with this funny little splash of lavender on the kitchen table.
On a broader, less-me level, it’s the Year of the Fire Horse, according to the Chinese Zodiac.
A time of “passion, ambition, and bold action,” the days of the years of the Fire Horse require “balance between strategic planning and impulsive energy for success.”
As a late thirty-something-year-old looking for a new job, it sounds almost like a locker room speech to rally heart and action. It sounds enthusiastic, thoughtful, and pragmatic.
However, I rarely know what I’m supposed to get out of zodiacs and horoscopes and tarots (or race projections by track experts at the Kentucky Derby, for that matter).
All the guessing, all the connecting, all the hoping. Sometimes, it’s too much.
But a poem can strike a nerve, fire a shot, blow over a house—in a much more tangible way for me. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
For example:
Or
From here, I reckon I’ll try to move forward somewhere in the middle of all this: the lavender, the fire horse, the poetry. I can make my own mess of the whole thing, and live there.
It could be that the fire horse is really off in a field of lavender somewhere, dreaming. Or maybe the lavender dreams of one day being a fire horse, taking down the Derby by ten lengths.
Hard to say.
Writing from Here 