The day before Christmas last year, my nearly six-year-old nephew announced that he had prepared a surprise for everyone. We were about to start dinner when it was my turn to be surprised. ‘Close your eyes and pick something,’ he said, holding a small carton box. I closed my eyes and fished out a lime green toy car. ‘Aha,’ my nephew said, and told me to follow him upstairs to his room.

There, he opened his closet, revealing a shelf full of animal figures, some large, some small. ‘You picked the car from the box, that means you can now have one of my animals,’ he explained. I looked at him for a moment, wondering if he really meant it. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Which one do you want?’

‘I think I need a strong animal,’ I said, picturing the year ahead in my mind. My nephew is a passionate collector of Pokémon cards and thus deeply understands the mechanics of danger, protection and magic. ‘Take the elephant and the mammoth’, he said. ‘They’re the strongest ones.’ He handed me a plastic elephant the size of a large pillar candle and a mammoth that just about fit in the palm of my hand. I lightly pushed my fingertips into its sharp tusks.

‘You mean I can take them both home with me?’, I asked. ‘Yeah,’ my nephew said. ‘For as long as you need’.

The elephant and the mammoth are now placed on the sideboard in my hallway and one of the first things I see when I come home. In some mysterious way, they remind me that this year calls for a very different kind of logic. You might call it dream logic or childhood logic. Conventional logic and pure rationality will not entirely cut it for the months ahead, I think. Not because 2026 is not a serious year; it is deeply serious, and dangerous too. But you already knew that. And when you’ve felt all the panic and outrage you can feel at the state of the world, what is left? What feeds your soul?

It might be something endangered, something extinct. Most likely, it won’t be grand, loud or shiny (unless we’re talking about real elephants, of course). It might have lived for a long time in a box in your attic, waiting to be found again.

As we move into the second half of January, you might notice a rising of the tension within and without. I say this because all of the personal planets – Venus, Mercury, the Sun and then Mars – will form a conjunction to Pluto in the early degrees of Aquarius over the next nine days. It’s a very distinct all-or-nothing kind of energy that can kick up our survival mechanisms and make us obsessive in our thinking. But on a personal, psychological level, Pluto also may unearth something that has tormented us for a long time and finally reveal its true unscary shape and size.

In ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’

It’s no small feat, to confront the things that frighten us. But the next couple of days invite us to do so. So here’s to trying, to staying with it. And to being surprised at what we dig up.