2023: A Retrospective
looking back on this collective seven year
What’s up, swimmers?! Does anyone else feel like that little dog in a top hat sitting with their coffee amongst the flames and saying it’s fine!?
2023, a seven collective year, has been downright chaotic.
Most of us have been, or still are, going through it.
Seven is The Seeker. It’s The Chariot and The Channel. It’s wrestling with spirituality and secrets, that which is known and unknown, and persevering through all states of being. Tending to our nervous systems and grappling with addiction, escapism, gnosis and crisis. Seven is both standing firm in clarity and continuing to put one foot in front of the other while walking through fog. It desires enlightenment through initiation and persistence.
Though seven energy can run the gamut from mysterious to miraculous, it’s not a gentle number, and cycling through it for an entire year can be a frustrating and triggering experience.
To quote my New Year Numerology 2023 newsletter from January:
It’s not always an easy ride, so while I would never deter you from moving into 2023 with hope and excitement, I also want to prepare you for the possibility that the external energies of this new year may feel intense.
Twelve months later, as I write this to you in December in New York City—a place that I love deeply, but as of earlier this year no longer live in—I both stand by my previous statement, and think I underestimated just how rough of a ride this year would (and continues to) be.
This year has felt like a strange portal to a new kind of liminal space. A rabbit hole that goes on forever, the “floor” a continually moving target. Even for us travelers who welcome that sort of thing, 2023 has brought with it a different sense of being untethered from people, places, systems, structures, beliefs, and even our own homes and bodies. It’s also seemed to hold everyone in limbo, with a whole list of questions, but very few answers.
The good news is that this will change next year - more on this in a couple of weeks!
Personally, the concept of time has been stretched thin this year, pounded down to something baffling and unrecognizable.
In August of this year, I sat down to a meditation practice and in popped an idea for a new book, fully formed and ready for me to sit down and start writing immediately. While in quite a few ways this is The Dream, it had certainly never happened to me before, and what has transpired has been a truly wild ride in trusting what’s coming through my channel, putting aside my creative ego, and most importantly, continuing to show up to work.
That book is currently out on submission, so I can’t share too much about it, but I am mentioning it here because as I reflect back on the seven (7) collective year of 2023 (2+0+2+3 = 7), I can’t help but see how perfectly this semi-individual process has embodied themes of the number seven.
Plus, a great deal of the research and synthesis (both seven themes) I’ve done so far for this book has dealt with the concept of time and timekeeping through a numerological lens. What I’ve discovered has really tickled me!
Using an alphanumeric cipher called the Pythagorean alphabet, which is used to convert words into numbers, the word time is revealed to hold the energy of the number three (3)… Three is both sudden inspiration, and an eternal river that can always be accessed or tapped into. It’s beauty. It’s madness. Unlimited potential. Chaos…
When things get murky, human beings often employ the coping mechanism of building structure… Getting too big, too fast, too loose can lead to a state of fear-induced overwhelm, which ironically has been scientifically proven to distort our experience of time. This is where the concept of the calendar comes in handy. And wouldn’t you know? When converted into numbers and reduced, calendar is a four (4) word—the next number in the numerological spiral.
As if that weren’t uncanny enough — Three, the ruling number of time, and four, the ruling number of calendar, added together equals seven.
One of my pieces of advice for 2023 was to cling to curiosity as a balm for all that is indecipherable. I hope that you’ve been able to do that this year, but if not, if you’re still swimming in that murky soup, I hope that you’re tending to yourself as gently and lovingly as possible.
Again, in the eight year of 2024, I hope that we’ll be off to the races in a way that we’ve been held back from this year.
Before I break down some of 2023’s most seven-like events, it would be remiss of me to sit here and write that this year has been trash without also acknowledging the ways in which it has been beautiful. There are always miracles to be experienced and in awe over, and perhaps it would do you some good to reflect on these as well as we reach the end of a tumultuous year. If this feels like a sticky practice, you’re not alone. I believe in you! We can do it together.
I hope that the relationships that you nurtured last year in 2022’s six year have continued to bloom, hold and support you through this one. I hope that all of the ways in which you have and are expanding have allowed you some moments of wonder and awe this year. And I hope that you have cultivated an inner fire that has kept you aflame and ready for what’s to come.
2023: Seven Energy in Action
There have been so many events in 2023 that I think represent the full spectrum of the number seven. Let’s take a look!
Seven as The Seeker:
OceanGate’s fatal journey to the Titanic wreckage site — In June 2023, a submersible named the Titan took five people under the sea to the famed final resting place of the Titanic. It disappeared, launching a full-scale investigation, and the remains of the sub and some of its inhabitants were found soon after.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket’s failure to launch — In November 2023, the uncrewed spacecraft successfully achieved lift-off, but exploded mere minutes after heading into space. SpaceX is said to be taking these learnings with them into the next phase of testing.
Seven and The Chariot as a symbol of resistance and war:
Russia’s continued attack on Ukraine — 2023 has seen the continuation of violence in Ukraine as Russia has continued to attack and invade. The war has already killed hundreds of thousands of people and there is currently no end in sight. Russia launched their most brutal missle attack in November, which is a harrowing pre-cursor for a second wartime winter in Ukraine.
Unyielding violence in Israel and Gaza — Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, killing 1,200 and taking additional hostages, Israel has launched a full invasion of Palestine, killing over 18,000 people and leveling the majority of Gaza in just 50+ days. A true humanitarian disaster is also looming over this genocide, as lack of access to food, water, shelter, and healthcare is sure to increase disease amongst Palestine’s remaining population, who’ve already been forced to leave their homes on foot.
WGA and SAG-AFTRA Unions strike in Hollywood — For the first time in sixty years, both the Writer’s Guild and the Screen Actor’s Guild went on strike against major Hollywood studios in order to negotiate fair pay, streaming residuals, protections against AI, and more. Studio heads showed their hands early, threatening to keep strikes going until industry professionals were left houseless, but through perseverance and solidarity, the Unions came out on top.
Seven and the delineation between private and public:
Prince Harry’s memoir Spare — Released in January of 2023, Prince Harry’s memoir made public quite a bit of private information about not only Harry’s life, but the entire Royal Family. One of his personal confessions, that he killed 25 Taliban fighters while in the military, also specifically hits the seven nail on the head (2+5 = 7). He also blames the Murdoch media empire for greatly skewing international reality.
FoxNews hosts leaked text messages about January 6th and election fraud — Speaking of the Murdoch media empire… A settlement between Murdoch-owned FoxNews and Dominion Voting Systems revealed Tucker Carlson’s “true” feelings about Donald Trump and the reality of his loss during the 2020 Election, despite saying the opposite on the air. Another set of messages between Laura Inghram, Sean Hannity, and Carlson show just how little loyalty the popular hosts have towards the news giant, shining a spotlight onto the dishonesty of the enterprise as a whole.
Seven Life Path and Public Personas in popular culture:
It was a massive year for Taylor Swift, a double 7 Life Path and Public Persona (her birthday is December 13, 1989. 1+2+1+3 = 7, 1+2+1+3+1+9+8+9 = 34/7), who cemented her billionaire status after breaking numerous records with her worldwide Eras tour, which also had a theatrical movie release. She also claims the three best selling albums of 2023: the re-release of her popular album 1989 (Taylor’s Edition), Midnights, and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). The latter two were both released in previous years, but continued to sell like hotcakes in 2023, and Midnights was awarded with a handful of Grammy nominations, which are sure to take the album’s success even farther into 2024.
2023 was also a huge year for Elon Musk, another double 7 (his date of birth is June 28, 1971. 6+2+8 = 16/7 and 6+2+8+1+9+7+1 = 34/7), who infamously purchased Twitter and
tanked the platformrebranded it to X, launched a SpaceX rocket that exploded in four minutes, and received FDA approval to begin human testing on his Neuralink implant.Greta Gerwig, a 7 Life Path (her birthday is August 4, 1983. 8+4+1+9+8+3 = 34/7), became the first female director to make a billion-dollar movie with Barbie.
What other events or people do you think have embodied the energy of this seven year?
Next Friday the 15th, I’m going to be previewing the first month of The Year of Yearning, a year-long course of study that will cover a plethora of topics from our traditional buckets of all things magical and mundane—witchcraft, religion, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, creativity, and more!
I’ll be pulling cards for January’s topic on December 12th’s New Moon in Sagittarius, which is all about higher learning, charting new courses, and moving forward with faith and fortitude! You’ll get a chance at a sneak peek of these cards and an opportunity to take advantage of the final day for Early Bird pricing for the entire year of study for just $44.
Read more about it HERE, and I’ll see you next week!