As we enter the final month of 2025, I find myself looking back through the lens of a year that felt both heavy and illuminating. December is my birthday month and with age—and with experience—I’ve realized how long I moved through life without seeing clearly. I viewed the world through a blurred lens, guided not by my own truth but by thin threads of stories woven by others. Stories passed down, repeated, inherited, and often shaped by people who were also trying to see through their own fog.

But this year, something shifted.

The veil lifted just enough for me to recognize what has long been wrong with the world—not just the noise, the division, the unrest, but the deeper fracture beneath it. We have been taught to see ourselves as separate: separated by parties, race, gender, religion, borders, and beliefs. We were conditioned to define ourselves by difference before we ever understood our sameness.

And yet, beneath it all, something truer has always existed.

What unites every supposed separateness—political, racial, cultural, spiritual—is our shared humanity.

A single, beating thread that lives in all of us.

An awakened source remembering itself.

This year has shown me that clarity isn’t just a personal revelation—it’s a collective one. When one person begins to see clearly, even a little, it softens the space around them. It creates room for truth, for compassion, for recognition. It reminds us that we are not strangers at war, but souls momentarily forgetting that we are made of the same breath, the same longing, the same light.

As 2025 comes to a close, I’m choosing to step into the new year with clearer eyes—eyes that see beyond the stories spun for us, and toward the deeper truth that has always been waiting to be remembered:

We belong to each other.

We are one humanity.

And when we awaken, we awaken together.

Gratefully yours,

Gloria Santiago, Owner