Partnering Up in 2026

Happy New Year!

It’s my ambition to bring The Zen Pagan back to active status this year, so watch this space.

Now, those who have been readers of this blog for a while may recall that it’s part of my practice to begin each year with a magickal theme, not something as specific as a New Year’s Resolution but something more vague and diffuse, an energy. I create a sigil on that theme, put it on the cover my bullet journal for the year, and leave it operating in the background.

This year, the theme is: partnership.

Those who know me personally or follow me on social media know that I’m in a new romantic relationship, one with the possibility and the intention to develop into a long-term deep partnership. So it has obvious and direct relevance there.

(If you don’t already follow my wacky adventures on the socials, I’m easy to find, a search on “Tom Swiss” will find me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, YouTube, and probably more to come.)

But it’s a theme that appears in other aspects of my life as well. A little over a year ago I moved my karate teaching to a dojo I run with a business partner and assistant instructor, someone who’s been able to fill in the gaps in my competence, from running a class for pre-school age students to business organization.

And it’s occurring to me that in my other business interests, I need to shift to more of a partnership model, working with rather than working for.

I’ve previously discussed a quote from Ursula LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan: “Alone, no one wins freedom.”

Another expression of the idea is in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—”We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We have a little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction.

We have to work together. The system of exploitative capitalism, the “1%” (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%) that runs the world is quite happy to see people squabbling, “canceling” each other over culture war issues, staying lonely and perplexed, fearful and suspicious of each other.

So I offer this theme for the year and this sigil, to manifest partnership in different aspects of life — both being open to finding partners for life, for business, for artistic creation, for magick, for building a better world, for all these things — and also trying to be a good partner myself.