Happy New Year to you, or as I like to view it a Happy Solar Return. For my comments today, I’d like to focus on the solar calendar rather than our man-made social calendar. This time of year marks the point in our Earth’s orbit around the sun to when the days start becoming longer - in the Northern Hemisphere. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, well sorry about that. But, here’s what’s interesting when you stop and think about it for a moment - which is what these annual celebrations are all about, really. Think about it:

The Earth endlessly orbits around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. And the winter’s solstice marks just one major point of that yearly orbital path through space. And when you take a step back, our Sun is also moving (and taking us along with it) - our Sun is orbiting around the galactic center of our Milky Way galaxy at 514,000 miles per hour. Step back a little farther and our entire Milky Way galaxy is traveling through space at over 1.3 million miles per hour! So quite literally we are space travelers and our planet Earth is our space craft. Have you ever considered that before?

As humans we’re hard-wired to focus on patterns and cycles - like days (the single rotation of the earth in 24 hours); or years and seasons (the single orbit of the Earth around the sun). It’s easy to overlook the fact that over the course of each cycle, each minute, each second - we are actually, physically occupying a new place in the universe than we did in the last cycle - or minute, or second. So while any point in the cycle may seem familiar, the present moment will always be at a new point in space in our journey of space travel.

That reminds me of the point I hope I made in my short story Journeying (if you missed that one here’s the link), the point of the story being a seeming paradox - that for all the things that feel the same there are infinite differences that make everything unique. And for all the differences we notice, things are more similar than we’d like to admit - no matter where you go. No matter how much of a grind your daily life feels like, each one is wondrously different if only because in that one day we have travelled over 36 million miles from where we were the day before! That’s a lot of difference and a lot of change.

Speaking of change, I have a couple of new ideas for Spawning Fish Tales that I want to share with you. The whole point of doing this experiment of Spawning Fish Tales for me is to have fun, to wonder, to improve and refine my storytelling skills, and to share those ideas and stories with you. I hope you’re having as much fun with them as I am - I suspect you are because you’re still here with me, and I thank you for that!

The first new idea comes in the format of this video actually. I’ll be collaborating with a long-time friend and artist Lil Olson who will be animating selected stories for retelling through video. We’ll be posting those videos here on Substack and after that maybe on YouTube. You can check out her website here.

Second, if you’d rather listen than read Spawning Fish Tales, I’ll be making an audio version of each story or poem for you. Those will be available on this Substack and hopefully on all the other places where you find your podcasts and audio - once I figure out that detail.

Finally, if you and enough of the other readers are interested I’m going to try hosting live video discussions to talk about a particular story, or the process I use in coming up with story ideas, or what ever else you might like to talk about. That one is totally an evolving project and I expect it will be really fluid in forming and evolving - but should be really exciting.

Now all of this will take additional effort on my part and others. So, to honor that effort I’ve created a new subscription structure where - if you’re able and willing - to upgrade to a paid subscription for as little as $5 per month. With the new subscription, in addition to the regular stories and poems you receive in your inbox already, you’ll get immediate access to the audio stories, the animated video stories from Lil Olson, and participation in the video discussion groups and on-line chat threads. And most importantly, you’ll get that splendid feeling of knowing that you are helping support the success of Spawning Fish Tales.

Now if that sounds like a big shift - it’s really not, because you can keep your subscription as it is - no change - and continue to receive my weekly stories to your inbox as you have been. Like our space travel through the universe, the more that things seem different, the more they’re the same.

I’m excited by these new ideas, and I’m sure they’ll evolve too as we progress through the year.

Looking ahead to next week, I’ve got a story for you about a man named Lawrence Edward Betterman, V who goes in search of an island to buy for himself, because he’s gone far too long without one. It’s made me laugh to write it, and I hope it brings a smile to your face as well. So don’t miss it!

Until then, I hope you have a fantastic week and remember - as my mother always told me - “Make sure you smile. Smiles are free, and they can make such a positive difference for the person you smile with.” And like my Mom also said, “show some teeth!”

Get full access to Spawning Fish Tales at spawningfish.substack.com/subscribe