2025 — The Year We Erupted: Creating in the Fire

STOP — BEFORE YOU READ ON:
If you’re looking for someone to tell you that struggle is a blessing, that “everything happens for a reason,” or that “God never gives you more than you can handle” — this is not that.

I put those thought processes to rest a long time ago, after adopting my kids from hard places — when I watched well-meaning adults tell them that maybe the unthinkable things that happened to them were “a blessing in disguise” or “part of God’s plan.” This is not a statement on religion, just my experience on how a well meaning remark can inadvertently shame someone into thinking it’s wrong to be angry or to process what has assaulted them.

It wasn’t until my mama-dragon scales showed up that I fully understood the violence of that kind of comfort. These kids didn’t need spiritual platitudes. They needed safety, validation, and the right to their anger.

So no — this isn’t a sermon on gratitude for pain.
This is an offering of hope.
A call to witness what’s emerging through the fire of 2025 — and to walk with me through it.

Look Around. Something Is Happening.

There is a stirring.

People are creating again.
Not little hobby bursts to pass the time — but full-scale reinvention.

Reinvention cooked in a cauldron of tears, loss, uncertainty, grit, and necessity — a recipe that only this year could have written.

• Side hustles are becoming main hustles.

• New businesses are blooming from kitchen tables and heartbreak.

• Grocery handoffs and barter circles quietly replace systems that failed us.

• Social media, once the loudest place on Earth, is softening — turning toward genuine connection, human faces, words that actually mean something.

Is this the return of the small business?
The handmade?
The human-scale life we thought we’d lost?

Because it sure feels like the soil is shifting.

And maybe that’s what happens when the ground shakes this hard — when a country endures a government shutdown that stretches endlessly, families without pay, neighborhoods without certainty — when fear becomes familiar.

AN AWAKENING

It didn’t feel like my world was falling apart. It actually was. The life I knew before June 2025 is gone. Not metaphorically. Not theoretically.

Gone.

That’s the distinction of this year. It’s not just instability — it’s the reality of collapse.

Our hierarchy of needs — Maslow’s tidy pyramid — cracked wide open.
Safety. Security. Belonging. Purpose. All shaken loose.

And yet somehow, through that fracture, light started to pour through.

THE RELEASE

We all have our cycles. We all cope in our own way.

For me, at first it looked like survival.
Then self-care.
Then fear.
Then maybe hope.

And then — mother-fucking eruption.

The pressure built quietly, like minerals forming beneath the earth. And then everything I had tucked away for “someday” burst free.

Visions. Art. Words. Ideas.
Molten. Lava. Scary. Inferno. Beautiful.

All the fear, love, grief, and unknowing fused together and exploded into creation.

Every design, meditation, and written line I’ve made since then has been a layer of lava cooling into permanence —
not to scar, but to mark; not to maim, but to memorialize.

Each layer, another river jewel — a striation of survival made beautiful.

A TIME FOR REST

I’ve watched rest and retreat happen all around me too.

My connection circles, my book club — once full and buzzing — went quiet these last months. Attendance small, replies sparse.

When I check in, every message reads like a chorus:

“I really need to show up again. I’m struggling so bad. I’ve retreated and don’t know how to rise.”

I see them. I feel them. And I get it.

When the world offers no safety, we have to weave our own.
So we cocoon.

We rest inside what we can control — the softness of blankets, the warmth of tea, the safety solace may provide, the small rituals that remind us we’re still here.

Rest.
But be careful not to stay too long.

NOW WE JOURNEY

The storm doesn’t have to be a blessing. You don’t need to be thankful for the fire.
Observation does not equal glorification.

The storm will end one day — but maybe not with fanfare. Too much has been lost for a neat finish line.

While it endures, though, watch how it transforms you. One does not rise from destruction without adjustment. Houses rebuilt after hurricanes aren’t identical — they’re fortified.

The safety we build inside ourselves becomes the launchpad. The cocoon becomes a forge. And from that fire, we create.

When we peek outside our cocoons, we see flickering lights from other shelters. We realize — we are not alone.

This is the work of connection. Not the fluffy, abstract kind — but the kind that begins deep in the gut, when we remember we are still alive and capable of building beauty from ruin.

So whatever your eruption looks like — Let it come.

Write the book. Bake. Break bread with your neighbors.

Sip tea with friends.  Notice what gifts your loved ones bring into this world.  Set aside critique for a moment. Smile at what remains.
Show the world what’s been swirling in your soul.

Start the side hustle. Paint. Sew. Scream. Build. Begin again.

Do it with fervor. Do it with faith. Do it with the strength of molten lava breaking skyward.

Because this is not the end. It’s the forging.

“Whenever you are ready, my dear.”
— Shatterwork Journal, by Shannon Elizabeth Marsh