Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

by Sophia Miceli

I have been thinking a lot about the Hand of Fatima as a door knocker, a wonder from my February in Portugal last year. Picture it. Doors crowned with iron hands lace the shore: Fatima, an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Her palm extends outward, fingers curved around a small sphere, usually an abundance of fruit, the metal darkened on her knuckles where generations have lifted it to knock. The object is devotional but also insistently physical. One does not pray to it. One grasps it. Here, the sacred isn’t distant; it’s handled.

Despite the world’s continual rehearsals of catastrophe, I find myself believing, almost irrationally, that this year will be auspicious. 

Not because the evidence persuades me. Not because things are softer recently. But because something in the air has altered its temperature. There is a glistening quality to ordinary hours. Even the winter light at five in the evening arrives ribboned in gold, adorning the sky with a pageantry it does not owe us. I look upward and see the atmosphere burnished, and in it, I see myself. I see you. We are at once the witnesses and the illumination. A thousand lanterns once lit by the sun alone. 

I’ve been thinking about thresholds, about what it means to stand before something closed and to feel not dread, but expectancy.

It’s true, an auspicious year isn’t a promise of ease. It’s a summons to contact. The hand fastened to the door does nothing on its own. It waits for someone to complete the gesture. To lift. To strike. To announce arrival. It teaches that entry requires touch and that beginnings require stark sound.

For some time, I mistook stillness for safety. I let my passions remain ornamental, admired but not inhabited. Books were arranged but not entered. Ideas hovered at a distance. Devotion thinned into preference. I stood before my life as though it were a museum display: lifeless, curated, untouched.

This year, I want my devotions to saturate me, to seep out through my teeth. To be so thoroughly engaged that the boundary between self and subject grows porous. Not consumption in the vulgar sense of acquisition, but in the older, more sacred sense: to take in until it alters the body’s composition. To be marked by attention. To let my fascinations leave a residue.

This could be what auspiciousness truly signifies: not luck bestowed, but depth achieved. A year in which affection is not timid. In which curiosity permits extravagance. In which we do not apologize for wanting to be filled.

You will see the glistening snowflakes descending, singular, intricate, and brief. There will be days when buses kneel toward your feet, when chance feels choreographed, and when the interior theatre of your mind opens onto improbable landscapes. Horses skipping sunrise sands, horizons widening even though your eyes are closed. 

These are not delusions of grandeur. They are indications of alignment. The world is not hostile; it’s responsive. 

And yet responsiveness requires motion. Health isn’t found in the stagnant. Salvation doesn’t occur in paralysis. Keep walking, even uncertainly, to collaborate with your own becoming. If a thought burdens you, walk until it loosens. If a door resists, knock until the sound steadies your hand.

Fatima’s iron palm doesn’t guarantee that the door will open. It guarantees only that you may ask.

This year, I want to ask.

I want to approach my work, my friendships, and my reading with the audacity of someone who believes abundance is not naïve but necessary. I want to treasure absorption. I want to let the things I cherish imprint themselves upon me so completely that, long after the season has passed, there remains proof—in posture, in language, in the quiet architecture of myself.

The world may continue its unrest. 

Still, the hand waits at the threshold.

Still, the sky ribbons itself in gold.

Still, we are given the capacity to lift, to knock, and to enter.

An auspicious year isn’t found.

It is struck.