Every year around this time we get together at a friend’s house to make mochi. It’s not the kind you think. We don’t have the giant mortar and pestle, the usu and ki-ne that requires a pair of folks to pound and fold in rhythm. Ours is a different tradition.
We use her grandma’s mochi maker, a contraption that looks a bit like an oversized rice cooker. The mochi rice is soaked, then cooked in the machine, which has a small paddle at the bottom of the bowl. After cooking, the little paddle turns and turns, eventually transforming the small grains into one big blob. When it’s smooth and supple, you use another bowl with a big puka in the bottom to pick up the hot blob, which makes a satisfying thwock kind of pop sound as it sucks up through the puka.
Then, teamwork. We work quickly—an oiled, experienced hand portions the mochi, and we all help shape and fill. We do traditional fillings like an, red bean paste, but we also love peanut butter, cheese. We also innovate sometimes and try new things like sausage and cream cheese and everything bagel seasoning, or Nutella, all delicious. We grill some and dip in shoyu and sugar, or kinako and sugar. We laugh, hands dusted white with kata-kuri-ko. We slip some into our soup and slurp it up, fresh and chewy and sticky and new, like the year.
We potluck and eat ozoni for good luck, delicious empanadas (family recipe!), fresh green salsa, and homemade cookies. Fried noodles with spam, juicy dark shoyu chicken with hot rice, and crunchy coconut sesame senbei. What are your rituals, how do you celebrate? Happy new year!
It’s been a year since I started this blog—the first post was January 6, 2025. It’s been a year of weekly reflecting and writing, and I am grateful for this. It’s also been a bit over year since Aunty Pua passed away. A year of integrating life without our mentor here in person. Of missing her jokes, quips, stories and principles, shared and received in rhythm like familiar refrains from old hymns.
Thinking of all the folks I know whose lives have been changed in any kind of way by Aunty Pua, I feel so humble and happy. Happy not just for them, but for her, imagining the joy she received from being in relationship, in circle, asking curious questions, pondering together, becoming, building beloved community.
I’m thinking of doing some interviews with folks who have been her students and sharing how her work is living on. Let me know what you think of this. I feel like that’s something that Aunty wanted: to know that her work would love on (live on?) and be useful to others.
I think our world is wild lately. We can’t expect that our days will continue to be the same, the way they’ve been, in the long and short evolution of our lives. Things can and are changing so quickly. With that realization comes the risk of fear. However, with that realization also comes potential, the potential to do, to be, so much more, to transform together, to resist individualization and separation and continue coming together. To live into the whole story.
I wish this for you and for all of us as we witness the end of the Gregorian year and slide into the new lunar new year. With some of my folks we are conjuring for ourselves more ease this year. More joy. More curiosity, more exchange. To resist the disease of busy-ness.
What’s the theme for you in the new year? May the sticky mochi of our relationships be blessed and abundant in 2026.
♥️ Dawn
Beannacht: A Blessing for the New Year
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.—John O’Donohue
Photo taken 1/4/25, one year ago at West Beach.