The year 2026 has offered both the expected and many unexpected developments that would not have been foreseen at this time in 2025. Learning from the experiences with both can lead us to look back on the past year and consider what we want the rest of 2026 to look like, to begin building a vision for next year.
Hearing the sounds of planes mixed with the calls of loons this morning provides a daily reminder of firefighters meeting each morning to plan another day’s effort of redefining normalcy leading into August. Next summer, large areas of forest will be renewed. As ripe fruit gets harvested this year, thoughts of tomorrow’s weather forecast are evaluated.
A hummingbird checks each flower’s potential that has developed from growth through leafing out, flowering, and fruiting. Each day and night closer to jewelweed flowering along a path south toward winter and a return in 2027.
Before forests of leaves change color and fall, the understory has completed its flowering and fruiting. The action occurs in sunlit open spaces as native and invasive species await pollinators and seed before summer ends. Hares-foot clover, goldenrod, bastard toadflax, thistles and others are alive with bumblebees and hawked by dragonflies and damselflies. Bogs, marshes, and sedge meadows flourish with pitcher plants, swamp milkweed, boneset, jewelweed, orchids, and aquatic plants.
Thinking back over the wild places and their progression, viewing this as the start and continuance of a coming year. Life renews and continues. We benefit from it, respect it and work to conserve all this that sustains us.
With birthdays that recently passed in June and July, it is easy to think of each one as the eve of the start of another new year of life, and it’s not only people who have another eve and year-beginning day. Visions can also have the same. School years, seasons, businesses, projects, event cycles, budget cycles, terms of office, election, etc. Virtually anything that comes to mind has potential, and some days and nights spent creating a vision to pursue.
There is a New Year’s Eve on July 31 for the start of another year on Aug. 1, and so much to wrap a vision around and look forward to. Nature gives thought to the potential of everything from the smallest to the largest, and a loon calling as this typed one calls to take notice.
