About Threshold: From 12/27 - 01/04  you will receive a daily piece of writing, art or a practice from a trusted esoteric practitioner. Our intention is to help reflect on the year you have had, and plant seeds of intention in 2025. Each of these practitioners is someone who I respect and admire, and is also part of the guest faculty for Emanate: Business School for Mystics.

 

The Ritual Archive
If you are joining after December 27th, you can access previous prompts & rituals at this link. The password is 2025

 

Dear Keeper of the Threshold

 

How are you feeling after yesterday's final New Moon of 2024? Today is such a beautiful poignant day for Threshold: A New Moon and a last day of 2024 converge in two very different time-tracking languages, as we also cross the midpoint of our 9 days of ritual.

 

A middle, a beginning and an ending at once.

 

Today, I am excited to present a Threshold ritual by my dear friend, neighbor, and collaborator Kate Belew Melton. Kate is a talented Word Witch, spell maker, and poet. Kate and I have collaborated on so many things including the Biophilia workshop (where biology meets poetry), Kate's Writing School, The Bardo, the podcast she co-hosts, Magick & Alchemy, and soon, in Emanate Business School for Mystics.

 

Kate and I love to talk about the edges of reality, the surreal happenings of the everyday, the hilarious & profound experience of being human, astrology, and what its like to be an esoteric poetic soul in the modern age in one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world. 

 

Kate is particularly gifted in blending the mythical, the creative, the supernatural, and the practical. Kate also helped me better understand how to create and market my most foundational offering, Create Your Cosmology with simplicity and clarity.

 

I hope you enjoy this Day 05 New Year's Eve Threshold Ritual by Kate. May it help you tap into your magic as you cross this spacetime threshold.

 

2025. Welcome! In the northern hemisphere, the Gregorian calendar changes in the heart of winter, days after the solstice, turning us inward to January. There are many new years in a year. There is a new moon each month, which invites a new beginning, a way to ritualize and honor cycles. The astrological new year is at the spring equinox, while others celebrate a witch’s new year at Samhain or a lunar new year in January or February. 

 

The new year arrives weeks after the Winter Solstice, and we turn the page to a new calendar. From this heart of winter, this stillness, change, and magic is afoot. Margaret Atwood says, “This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.” 

 

There are thresholds everywhere we look, inviting us across, making us different, and celebrating and singing the little aspects of life that cultivate enchantment and magic. The etymology of threshold comes from the word threshing, which is loosening or separating the edible part of grain from the straw and husk. It means an entryway, a way through, a starting point. A threshold is a place that makes us different, separating one moment of life from another, a blessing, an initiation. 

 

In a poem by John O’Donohue, “To Bless The Space Between Us,” he writes, “Without warning, thresholds can open directly before our feet… In the ecstasy and loneliness of one’s life, there are certain times when blessing is nearer to us…Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.” 

 

 

A symbolic threshold

A piece of paper and writing utensil

 

A symbolic threshold can be anywhere that represents the place of the threshold to you: a doorway, an entryway, a broom laid down on the ground, a ribbon, or a hearth, for example. Bring your piece of paper and writing utensil to your threshold, and write a letter to the threshold. 

 

Honor the year that has passed, grieve what longs to be grieved, note what the threshold means to you and what it symbolizes, and then cast your eyes on the year ahead. What hopes, fears, anxieties, or intentions do you have for the days on the other side of the threshold? Then, finally, finish your letter with three blessings: a blessing on the past year, a blessing on the present and the threshold, and a blessing on the year ahead. 

 

Read your letter aloud, and then take a step across, a leap, or a twirl over the threshold. Fold your letter and keep it somewhere safe to read at the following year, the next threshold. Sending you so much love and liminal blessings! 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed Day 05's magic of Threshold. If you'd like to connect more with Kate, I suggest checking out her generous substack here, or tuning into her workshop which will be part of Emanate.

 

Kate Belew is a Brooklyn-based Writer, Poet, Storyteller, and Witch. Her work spans genres and spaces: poetry, nonprofits, immersive theatre, health & wellness, herbalism, witchcraft, and the psychedelic. She has a decade of experience in writing facilitation and teaching, copywriting, social media, and content marketing. You can also find her on a bi-weekly podcast she co-hosts called Magick & Alchemy. She is the co-author of Wild Medicine: An Illustrated Guide to the Magick of Plants with Shelby Bundy and Tamed Wild, and is the author of a chapbook called 13 Writing Spells with LoomBound. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Writing, is an Initiated Green Witch, and has studied Herbalism, Astrology, Energy Healing, and Green Witchcraft.

 

 

Here is the first reveal of Kate's workshop in Emanate.

 

Your work in the world is an offering. Therefore, sharing your work is an act of service, a beacon through the night that says, "Hello, I am here too." When you allow your light to shine, you give permission to others to shine their lights too, and you're able to meet your people. Social media and newsletters are tools in your toolbox on your business journey. Learning to utilize and collaborate with these tools are spells. During this workshop, we'll talk social media and newsletter basics from a witchy perspective, and like any good practical magic, we'll start from the foundation.

 

You can see the Emanate curriculum preview at SchoolofTheImaginal.com with the password EMANATION

 

If you'd like to create your intentions for 2025 in community, I invite you to join Seeding Visions, my workshop for the New Year here.

 

If you missed any previous rituals, you can find them here. Use password 2025

If you received this from a friend, and would like to join Threshold, click here.