A New Year's Vision for 2026 - The Year of the Eye
It is New Year's Eve 2026. I am sitting at the dinette aboard the yacht Moira, anchored in a wilderness bay where there are no houses, no people, no roads, no fences. Frederique is making digital drawings of mermaids, her fingers moving across her tablet with quiet intention. Café de Anatolia flows softly from our Bluetooth speaker—a voice carrying us across continents and time. Flash, our monstrous pussycat, sprawls across the table behind my rather ancient notebook, purring as if he holds the secrets of the universe. An excellent internet connection via smartphone means I am not really alone, though I am surrounded by solitude.
This morning, Frederique and I walked the wilderness trail to Pipette Creek with a small, feral forest friend—now ten years old, a mother cat we rescued when she was tiny and wounded. She follows us as if we are her parents.
The day before, a huge low pressure system blasted New Zealand, sending cool winds northward into our anchorage. I feel them now—the breath of distant storms, the Earth speaking to itself through the movement of air and sky.
I am mentally peering into the future, asking the question I ask each year: What will 2026 bring?
And I see: The Year of the Eye.
Finding the Images
I spent the afternoon searching through photographs, looking for an image that would speak the truth of the coming year. And I kept finding the same thing, over and over: eyes.
Eyes formed by the clouds and the sea. Eyes at dawn and at dusk—those liminal hours when the world is both awakening and darkening, when light and shadow dance with equal power. In each photograph, I saw an iris, a pupil, a gaze looking back at me from the sky and water themselves.
Why eyes? I wondered. What is my higher self trying to tell me?
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| Mackerel Skies and Mares Tails Make Lofty Ships Carry Low Sails |
The Seized Bolt
After our morning walk, we returned to our anchored yacht in our 3.6-meter dinghy. The nuts on the swivel bolt of the 25HP Yamaha outboard were a mass of rust and I had ordered a new bolt. It was time to replace it.
I hooked the outboard to a lifting arm on the stern, and Frederique winched it up. I set it down inside the dinghy with bumpers to keep it steady. For twenty minutes, I hammered with a cold chisel, breaking away layers of rust until finally—finally—I wrenched the nut free.
But when I pushed on the the old bolt, expecting it to slide out, it would not budge.
I put a block of wood against its 1" diameter end and hit it with the hammer. Nothing. I chiseled away rust from the other side. Hit harder. Still nothing. For fifteen minutes I hammered, my frustration growing with each blow. The bolt had seized inside the transom clamp—locked in place by forces I could not see, by mechanisms hidden inside the metal itself.
And yet. And yet the swivel clamp worked perfectly; moved easily when I tilted up the engine. The mechanism functioned flawlessly.
I set down my hammer. We winched the outboard back into place. Frederique fixed a delicious lunch with fresh-made sourdough bread.
And sitting there, eating, I began to understand what the Year of the Eye was all about.
Some things are locked in place. You can see them. You can perceive them. They are there, seized tight by forces you cannot reach, reasons hidden where no hammer can touch them. These are the kingpins—the structures, the powers, the systems that seem immovable. But here is the secret: it is not your job to hammer them out. It is your job to see them, accept them, and move forward anyway.
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| Anchored in the Calm of the Eye |
The Dialogue
I sit at this dinette, looking at the photographs, the mackerel skies, the peaceful anchorage, thinking about the seized bolt, and I ask aloud:
Me: Higher Self, what does the Year of the Eye mean? The world outside these wilderness bay waters is in chaos. Mackerel skies are gathering. People are hammering at seized bolts, trying to force what cannot be forced, destroying themselves and each other in the process. How do we live with peace when the storms are gathering? How do we maintain the eye?
Higher Self: The eye is not escape. The eye is perception. It is the place where you stop believing hammering will work. Where you clearly see some structures are locked in place; seized by their own rust, their own hidden contradictions. Your job is not to free them. Your job is to see them, accept their existence, and refuse to exhaust yourself in futile struggle.
Me: But how do I help others find this eye? How do I teach this?
Higher Self: You don't teach it. You live it. You anchor yourself in peace. You walk in wilderness. You rescue feral kittens and let them become your family. You listen to Café de Anatolia and draw mermaids. You eat sourdough bread with someone you love. You feel the cool winds from distant storms and know the storms are not your storms to fight. You smile. You help when help is needed. You share what you have. You feel your oneness with the land, the sky, the sea—not as philosophy, but as lived reality.
Me: This sounds like non-involvement.
Higher Self: It is not non-involvement. It is wise involvement. It is refusing to pour your precious life-force into battles that cannot be won by hammering. It is understanding that every person who finds their own eye, who stops exhausting themselves against seized bolts, becomes a beacon. Every person who chooses peace becomes an invitation to peace. You are not responsible for changing the kingpins. You are responsible for not becoming seized by rust yourself.
Me: And the people I send this message to? The friends scattered across the planet?
Higher Self: Invite them to find their own eye. Show them it is possible. Show them that you, at eighty-six years old, anchored in a wilderness bay with a cat and your beloved and the music of the world flowing through your speakers, have found it. That it is real. That it is available. That the storms will circle, and the mackerel skies will warn, and the kingpins will remain seized—and none of that has to be their life. Their life can be the eye. Their life can be the calm. Their life can be the sacred garden where consciousness meets itself and recognizes its own beauty.
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| Eye of Peace |
The Kingpins and Their Networks
The knowing eye peering into 2026 sees kingpins—individual human beings; ego-fueled psychopaths positioned in the hierarchy of human control networks (what we call structures of power), licensed by constitutions, laws and regulations designed over millennia to foster the growth and evolution of knowledge. Control networks imagined, agreed and implemented to bring peace, prosperity and knowledge to the integrated web of life on our planet.
When these systems become perverted by kingpins who feed on fear, hate and ignorance, they flood these qualities throughout the control networks and all those who march in step with them.
But if those who live in and under the control networks remain calm, peaceful, insightful, and practice informed strategic disengagement, the floodwaters and earthquakes manufactured by the kingpins will subside and fade into the past.
Help your family and friends to find the peace and happiness through strategic disengagement. Live peacefully and happily, avoiding the kingpins swirling their batons and their minions offering blinders or hunting any who would oppose them.
The Year of the Eye
2026 is the Year of the Horse in the ancient calendar—the year of freedom, energy, enthusiasm, passion. But what I see is this: true freedom is not in frantic galloping. True freedom is in knowing when to still the horse. In anchoring yourself in the center while the world spins around you.
The eye of the hurricane is the calmest place. Not because there is no storm. But because you have chosen to be in the one place where the storm cannot reach you.
This is not defeat. This is wisdom. This is the deepest form of freedom—the freedom to say no to what does not serve life, and yes to what does. The freedom to walk away from the hammering and toward the bread, the music, the beloved, the wild things that trust you, the photograph of clouds that look like eyes.
The Invitation
Wherever you are on this planet—in cities or villages, in mountains or deserts, surrounded by conflict or insulated from it—I invite you to find your eye. Not your escape. Your eye. The place of clarity where you can see both the storms and the calm. Where you can acknowledge the seized bolts without spending your life trying to free them. Where you can choose, moment by moment, to live from peace rather than from fear.
Find the thing that is your Moira—your anchor point, your sacred space, your refuge. It might be a literal place. It might be a practice. It might be a relationship, a garden, a way of moving through the world. Find it. Tend it. Protect it. Live from it.
Feel your oneness with the land, the sky, the sea. Not as metaphor. As lived truth. The earth that feeds you is you. The sky that surrounds you is you. The sea that moves with its own consciousness is you. When you remember this, the kingpins lose their power. The hammering stops mattering. You are free.
In 2026, may you find your eye. May you anchor there. May you smile at the storms while you tend your garden. May you help others find their own centers. May you remember the most revolutionary thing you can do is to refuse to be consumed by what you cannot control, and to pour your life force into what you can: into love, into presence, into the sacred ordinariness of being alive on a beautiful, broken, healing planet.
Written aboard the Moira, anchored in a wilderness bay,
the day before the Year of the Eye begins.
With deep love for this beautiful, troubled world
and boundless faith in your capacity to find peace within it.
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