What if the year did not just pass you by, but quietly looked back at you?
What if it noticed the moments that never made the highlight reel or the end-of-year review?
In this end-of-year episode of The Download, Jill shares a moment of heightened perception beneath a tree on Christmas Eve, where sunlight flickering through the leaves appeared like a thousand twinkling eyes - Indian goddess eyes, faerie eyes - and carried a powerful feeling of being seen.
That moment becomes the doorway into a deeper reflection on symbolism, spiritual experience and the quiet ways meaning shows up in our lives. Drawing on Jungian psychology, mythic storytelling and timeless human relationships with trees, from the Bodhi tree of the Buddha to modern creative inspiration, this episode explores why lived experience so often comes before explanation and why symbols speak for us and to us where language falls short.
Rather than offering a traditional year-in-review or achievement-based retrospective, this episode invites a different kind of reflection, one that honours glimmers over goals, presence over productivity and the moments where light got through. It explores the unseen stories that rarely make it into highlight reels, the acts of care and connection that happened offstage and the small, luminous moments that pass in the blink of an eye.
With 2025 marking the completion of a nine-year cycle in numerology and the Chinese Year of the Snake, Jill offers a gentle framework for reviewing not just the past year but the themes and highlights of the last nine, not as a scorecard but as a guidance card. It's a way of noticing what you are ready to release with relief, what you are grateful for and what you want to carry forward with intention.
This is an episode for anyone who is tired of ‘Thank God that’s over’ thinking and curious about how reflection, gratitude and symbolic meaning can shape the year ahead.
In this episode
Timestamps
00:00 A thousand twinkling eyes
01:30 Trees, presence and spiritual symbolism
03:45 Jung, myth and the language of symbols
06:10 Glimmers not goals, rethinking year-end reflection
08:40 The unseen stories that shaped the year
10:30 2025 and the closing of a nine year cycle
12:45 A guidance card for the year ahead
14:30 Final reflections, being seen and seeing clearly
Find out more about Jill’s best-selling fiction and storyworlds on girlpowerpublishing.com.
Find The Download Podcast on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram,
Apple Podcasts, Spotify and LinkedIn
